--- In cybalist@..., "michael_donne" <michael_donne@...> wrote:
> ... I own these two. The problem is that they are based on
historicallinguistics not the authentic vedic texts so they can't
really help me establish the actual pronunciation since it's
historical linguistics that I'm questioning. That would be circular.
I guess I'll end up reading the pratishakhyas to see if it is
possible to really know how they were pronounced.
Do go and read them if you haven't so far. The ancient phoneticians
were brilliant observers. And do learn something about historical
linguistics before you question its methods and results; it's putting
the cart before the horse if you don't quite know what you are
arguing against.
> ... The point about the meters is very telling. The Greeks had
short and > long versions of 'e' and 'o' right? How were they
pronounced? Do we have an examples of them being used metrically like
the Sanskrit?
The Greek metres were quantity-based like the Vedic ones, and the
difference between "epsilon" (short /e/, a mid to mid-high vowel)
and "eta" (long /E:/, a mid-low vowel) was of course metrically
relevant. There are tens of thousands of examples in Greek poetry.
> Is the reconstruction of PIE e,a,o necessarily connected to the
meter? These could be two separate issues: length vis a vis PIE
reconstruction vs. length as used in chanting....? I'll have to think
about this.
The poetry metre only employs quantities normally used in everyday
speech. Long and short vowels have different historical reflexes in
all the branches of PIE, so that e.g. it's Greek "eta" and "omega"
that correspond regularly to Skt. a:, and "epsilon" and "omicron" to
Skt, a.
> OK, that's what I thought you meant. The Sanskrit terms are 'laghu'
light and 'guru' heavy. Unless they also differentiate them in other
ways. I've studied Sanskrit but not the writings of the original
grammarians.
Actually these terms correspond to our notion of syllable weight
rather than vowel length. The Sanskrit grammarians called the long
and short vowels <di:rgHa-> and <hrasva->, though they tended to
confuse vowel and syllable quantity (the Greeks, if that's any
comfort, were still less clear about the difference).
> I guess the central point of this whole argument is when Hock
says: "the correspondence of Sanskrit a- vowels to Latin and Greek e-
, a-, and o- vowels cannot be explained by means of a regular sound
change that "split" the 'a' of Sanskrit into the e, a, o of the other
languages."
> My question is: Why not? Apart from the fact that it's really
messy. 3 > 1 is certainly preferable in a theoretical sense than 1 >
3. Are there any other reasons? Are there any environment where this
does not happen or where it is explainable in other ways?
No, it's an unconditioned merger. But traces of the old differences
remain: /a/ that derives from *e palatalises preceding velars,
and /a/ derived from *o is lengthened in some environments.
> Do you know of any really long lists of where this happens plus any
exceptions?
See the relevant handbooks. Too little space here.
> > *keu, *geu, *gHeu > *cau, *jau, *jHau > co, jo, ho
> Here's one of my fundamental problems: where are the attested
languages on the left side of the equation? Shouldn't we start from
what we know or at least start from what we know, work backwards then
forwards again to what we know?
We do. The asterisked reconstructions represent, in a condensed way,
sets of regular correspondences in the attested languages, analysed
very carefully with the help of comparative method. Note that this is
_not_ an "equation" but a historical derivation. I can't use attested
languages on its left side, because the langauges ancestral to
Sanskrit (PIE and Proto-Indo-Iranian) are not directly documented,
and Sanskrit does not derive from Greek, Latin or Hittite (nor do
they derive from Sanskrit). They are all daughters of PIE, and none
of them is given privileged status.
>> ... I have to refer you to any handbook of IE or any good
historical grammar of Sanskrit.
> ... please do ...
My favourites, if you want to learn all about the nuts and bolts side
of historical linguistics in a reader-friendly way, are:
Hans H. Hock. 1991. Principles of Historical Linguistics. Berlin/New
York: Mouton.
Raimo Antttila. An Introduction to Historical and Comparative
Linguistics.
Roger Lass. 1997. Historical Linguistics and Language change.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
As a general introduction to IE studies, the following is to be
recommended (its slightly idiosyncratic and not always up to date,
but more readable than most other handbooks):
Oswald J.L. Szemerényi. 1999. Introduction to Indo-European
Linguistics.
Piotr