--- In cybalist@..., "michael_donne" <michael_donne@...> wrote:
> Why do linguists say that Sanskrit only had the (basic) vowels
> i, a, u and not the vowels included in the Latin/Greek e, a, o
> when it is obvious from the extant earliest Sanskrit texts that
> they had e and o?
Sanskrit has only long 'e' and 'o', and they're clearly phonetic
realizations of the diphthongs 'ai' and 'au' (or 'ay' or 'av')
in a closed syllable, replaced by 'ay' and 'av' in open syllables.
Greek has three phonemically independent short vowels 'a', 'e'
and 'o', and three corresponding long vowels. Each can occur in
all positions including diphthongs, but Sanskrit 'e' and 'o' only
occur as variants of 'ay' and 'av' in certain positions. In fact,
a phonemic description of Sanskrit's entire vowel system requires
no more than /a/, /y/, /v/, /r/and /l/. See Jens Elmegaard
Rasmussen's post explaining this at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pieml/message/406 .
> Why do they ignore the existing extensive evidence in favor of
> some hypothetical construct when it seems apparent to me that
> humans probably had those sounds from near the time they diverged
> from chimpanzees.
There are probably thousands of distinct sounds pronounceable
by humans (I don't know if anyone has ever counted), and far
more possible vowels sounds than just 'a', 'e' and 'o', but
each language only uses a small selection of them. As you
will find out from Jens' post, phonemically speaking, Sanskrit
actually has only one vowel!
David