Piotr:
>It seems to have been an *o-present, cf. Gk. pHo:go:.
Cool. I like *o-presents. I wish I knew which IE verbs were
*o-presents though. What are the others? So the 3ps would be
*bHo:geti, then?
>The short vocalism of the present tense in Germanic looks secondary; in
>general, the a ~ o: ~ o: ~ a ablaut is hard to
>explain.
Ooh, nifty. Something inexplicable... I want to explain this!
Here we go. I would say that the vocalism was originally just
*a throughout in late Mid IE. However, voiced bilabial phonemes
such as *bH caused the rising of early Late IE (eLIE) *[a] to
*[A] (the same vowel as the alternant of *[E] next to uvulars).
While *A was the voiced-bilabial-induced allophone of *a (later
*o), the sound change didn't operate on long vowels. (I'm thus
implying that *bhohg- should be understood as *bho:g- instead.)
After this, the general Late IE vowel shift caused *a>*o, and
*A>*a, as usual.
So, to sum up, it all has to do with *a being originally an
allophone of *o when neighbouring *m, *b, *bH and possibly *w.
Hear me now, think later.
>*bHeh1- 'bake, warm' (without the extension) is visible in OHG ba:en <
>*be:-j-an- (< *bHeh1-je-).
Where else? Maybe I'm off but it's looking to me like *bHeh- and
*bHo:g- actually have different origins given my ideas above.
- gLeN
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