On Tue, 22 Apr 2003, Glen Gordon wrote:
> ... 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.
I would take it up as a good suggestion if it had not been disproved over
and over again. But yes, most ablaut was caused by the accent; and yes,
unaccented short vowels used to be deleted. Only, that does not mean that
all unaccented short vowels are of a younger make, for something else
which was also as old as Methusalem could remember may have developed into
them. The change of IE *t to thorn in Germanic does not prevent Germanic
from having a /t/ from a different source. That principle seems to have
been forgotten in reasoning over IE ablaut. For one thing, the "thematic
vowel" never goes to zero, there just is no such alternation. That is a
fact that needs an explanation. I once believed the them.vow. had
something in it (a glottal stop was my best guess) that made it specially
audible and so immunised it against deletion. I have since realized I
overlooked the obvious, namely its position: the them.vow. is the only
vowel occurring in stem-final position. I am not sure what that exactly
means, but it apparently imparted a special kind of resistence on the
vowel. Anyway, it is a descriptive fact that vowels in this position
alternate in a way all their own, and totally uninfluenced by the accent.
These facts were observed by Saussure already. The thematic vowel shows
alternations governed by the phonetic property of the following segment
(this was also seen by Saussure, although he did not get it right). Since
the VERY SPECIAL status of the thematic vowel must have its phonetic
justification VERY FAR back in prehistory, it must be dated to a time way
before the nicely transparant parts of the accent-governed ablaut came
into being. Therefore, the thematic type is not younger than the ablaut.
If it were, we would find the same e/o alternation depending on the
voicing of the following segment with other vowels also, which we do not.
Jens