Miguel:
>The point is that the thematic vowel has to survive quantitive
>ablaut in order for any further developments to be able to occur
>later.
??? It's logically inefficient to claim that the thematic vowel
had some sort of magic resistance against this ablaut. It's
simpler to presume the vowel postdates the trigger of this ablaut.
It would appear that Occam's Razor is giving you the third finger.
>Let's [take] a 3sg. thematic verbal form like *bh�ret. If the
>zero grade rule is formulated as "unstressed /e/ (or whatever
>its predecessor, say /a/) is dropped", we would expect **bh�r-a-t >
>*bh�r-t, or *bhar-�-t > *bhr�-t. So that won't do.
First, the earliest Late IE form of *bHeret after apocope and
the development of quantitative ablaut was *bHer-&(-t&).
The ablaut rule at that time was, if it's zero-grade and you
wanna accent it, put an *e in it. If you wanna unaccent a full
grade form in a paradigm, leave the vowel there, otherwise
zero-grade it.
I've said this a million times already, Miguel, that there is
paradigmatic resistance of zero-grading in order to avoid
stem obscurity, which is why we don't find **pdos as the
genitive of *pod-.
However, you've made me realize that early Late IE _did_ allow
unaccented full vowels (in _pretonic_ position only) because the
plural of *bHer-& had to have been *bHer-en with final accent
(nb: Acrostatic Regularisation comes later). In Mid IE, however,
it was *bH&r-en& -- Again, the first *& resists loss due to the
natural need to preserve the clarity of the stem within a
paradigm (aka "Paradigmatic Resistance").
>If we reformulate it as: "unstressed non-morpheme final /e/ (/a/)
>is dropped", we get *bh�r-a-t > *bh�r-e-t (OK) or *bhar-�-t > *bhr-�-t (not
>OK, but OK for the tud�ti type).
Not okay at all. I'm sticking with the Paradigmatic Resistance rule
because it's simple, straightforward, logical and explains the most.
>Yet another possibility is the vrddhi solution
Ugh.
- gLeN
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