Re: [tied] Sanskrit and e, a, o

Thanks for the replies, David and Piotr!

If you have any references for more background reading on this, I'd
like to do some more homework. This is a central concept to IE and I
want to look into it deeply.

David: 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.

MD: I question that. In fact, I would reverse it: 'ai' and 'au' are
considered by ancient Indians to be further along the spectrum
than 'e' and 'o'. Westerners commonly (mis)pronounce 'e' and 'o' as
long syllables, but most if not all Indians pronounce them short.
Perhaps I don't understand you: could you define open and closed
syllable?

David: Greek has three phonemically independent short vowels 'a', 'e'
and 'o', and three corresponding long vowels.

MD: Unfortunately, this discussion is about to crash on the rocks of
Phonology like so many others since I don't know Greek (although I
can see I may have to pick it up). In order to make sure we're all on
the same Phonetic page can you refer to a web site and click on the
vowels chart so see if any of these sounds are represented there?
http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonant
s/course/chapter1/chapter1.html

Also, if you go to the IPA chart and download the Hindi sounds and
listen to 'dirt.wav' which is the Hindi word 'maila' you'll hear how
short this supposed 'ai' dipthong actually is.

David: Each can occur in
all positions including diphthongs, but Sanskrit 'e' and 'o' only
occur as variants of 'ay' and 'av' in certain positions.

MD: Can you give me more information on this limitation of Sanskrit?
I'm not aware of it.

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.

David: In fact,
a phonemic description of Sanskrit's entire vowel system requires
no more than /a/, /y/, /v/, /r/and /l/....
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!

MD: This is my main issue: I can accept this kind of "only one vowel"
thinking in a theoretical sense but to apply it to a language that
clearly demonstrates a, e, o in massive amounts of historical
documents in order to try to reconstruct something that is supposed
to have REALLY HAPPENED in a real time and place, strikes me as
absurd. And to make it one of the pillars of the entire PIE
reconstruction seems very shaky to me. Theory and practice need to be
kept distinct.

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> The basic short-vowel system of Sanskrit (ignoring syllabic
liquids) is just that: [i], [a], [u]. At a sufficiently high level of
abstraction it is even possible to regard [i] and [u] (at least when
analysing vowel alternations) as surface realisations of
underlying /y/ and /w/.
>

MD:As I said above, I think applying a "high level of abstraction" to
try and reconstruct something that was supposed to really happen and
to base it on two ACTUAL languages: Sanskrit and Greek, seems
misguided.

> This is not a "hypothetical construct" of modern scholars: the
ancient Indian grammarians analysed their vowel system in exactly the
same way.
>

MD: Yes, but they left it as an abstract concept, as far as I know.

> The status of [e:] and [o:] (always phonetically long) is special.
Unlike [a:], [i:], [u:], they have _no short counterparts_ in
Sanskrit, and in vowel alternations they pattern in a way that
reveals their secondary character and diphthongal origin:
>
> reduced grade normal grade lengthened grade
> - -------------- a ------------- a:
> i -------------- e: ------------- a:i
> u -------------- o: ------------- a:u
> R -------------- ar ------------- a:r

My understanding is that 'i' was normal grade and 'e' was the first
level of strengthening. I'd love to see some references to Sanskrit
grammar that show otherwise -- or that even discuss this in general.

Also, phonetically long may refer to stress only.

> Is the rationale good enough?

Nope. Not yet. :-)


> BTW, humans can make a many different sounds, but don't always
employ them as speech segments. There are numerous languages with
small vowel inventories, and the three-way system /a, i, u/ is
relatively common.
>

Yes, but these are clearly used in speech so any kind of
reconstruction from one or even three vowels is extremely
theoretical. My point is that no one probably ever spoke with only
one vowel in real life so the practical value of this concept is nil.
I'm concerned with using this idea as the foundation of understanding
REAL languages and, so far, I don't see how it helps. But it may very
well have led to a fundamental misunderstanding. (The voice of the
over-confident tyro :-) )

If I wanted to retrace the original thinking on this, where should I
start? And where could I get long lists of words that compare this
instead of the few select examples that prevail in the textbooks?