I to Miguel:
>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.
Jens retorts:
>Quite on the contrary. This has of course been tried for over a
>century, and we would have known about it if it worked. It just does not,
>and then even Occam needs the help of an extra finger
>to tie the knot.
I expected a more direct, less rhetorical reply from you on this
matter. I don't accept careless dismissiveness without a fight >:)
But then, perhaps you couldn't bear wasting your metaphorical,
phalangic imagery on me, so I have room for forgiveness in my
charred, blackened heart.
In seriousness, you're sadly overlooking what I'm saying. The
development of the thematic vowel must postdate a stage of preIE
where quantitative ablaut was triggered. By common sense, we all
know what triggered quantitative ablaut -- stress. The zero-grade
is caused by nothing else but the loss of an unstressed vowel.
In other words, I'm saying that the thematic vowel postdates the
loss of unstressed vowel.
Yet this is an obvious logical conclusion, since to put the thematic
vowel BEFORE the loss of unstressed vowel would put it in danger of
the very loss it is supposed to have escaped from! We are either
forced to reject this predating, or we must desperately multiply
hypotheses with yet more conjecture!
Given this inescapable logic then, Jens, I fail to see what your
above rhetoric was meant for other than a playful double entendre
(which is fun nonetheless) but in the end, I could care less with
what "hasn't worked in the last century" any more than Copernicus
concerned himself with what worked in his previous century... and
perhaps it's better that way, because now we have the Hubble Space
Telescope.
- gleN
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