Miguel:
>>Is it possible that a "heavy syllable", at a stage just before
>>Common IE, might be described as either monosyllabic CVC, or
>>a syllable of the form (C)CVCF(C...) where C refers to any consonant
>>and F refers to all voiceless continuants (*x, *xW, and *s)?
>
>A heavy syllable is a syllable of the form ...VCC or ...V:C (and
>..VCCC, ..V:CC, etc.).
You don't seem to get what I'm refering to. I'm trying to
explain the origin of vrddhi through automatic syllable rules
because I'm convinced that vrddhi is not an old feature of IE
but that its presence was originally determined purely by the
shape of the syllable.
It's like in English where the vowel in "bid" [bI.d] is
automatically longer than in "bit" [bI?]. Why? Well, it depends
in this case on whether the final phoneme is voiced or not.
However, other languages operate differently and may lengthen
words according to completely different criteria.
Ergo... I'm trying to find a similar scenario in IE. I believe
it was you, Miguel, that mentioned *s causing length without
being lost (in relation to aorists), was it not? Certainly we
see that nominative *-s causes length. But if we follow the
idea the length is not caused by compensatory lengthening, but
rather by syllabic rules, we might play with the idea that
a syllable CVCF(C) might be prone to lengthening in IE just as
CVC words with final voiced stops are lengthened unconsciously in
English.
Further, such a pattern would make a lot of sense if we compare the
treatment between voiced continuants (*m, n, *l, *r) which can have
their own syllable without problems versus unvoiced continuants
(*s, *h, *x, *xW) which either cannot be syllabic at all or whose
syllabicity remains subservient to the syllabicity of any
neighbouring voiced counterparts or semivowels. The resistance
of unvoiced continuants to syllabicity may be offset by their
tendency to lengthen vowels.
Isn't that exciting?! Get it now?
- gLeN
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