On Thu, 24 Apr 2003 18:29:31 +0200 (CEST), Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
<
jer@...> wrote:
>Indeed I believe they survived ablaut unimpaired. The loss of unstressed
>vowels skips stem-finals. They must do that for a reason, but that has not
>been found.
I've been looking, but haven't found it.
Going back to specifics: except perhaps for the ordering of the rules
(is there a need why the thematic vowel rule must come _after_ zero
grade, so pressing that o-stem Gsg. *-osyo has to be explained by
analogy instead of, as is preferrable, by sound law?), we seem to be
in agreement about, to quote my earlier message:
Pre-ablaut *perk^-sk^é-t, *perk^-sk^e-ént
Them.vow. rule *perk^-sk^é-t, *perk^-sk^o-ént
Zero-grade *prk^sk^é-t, *prk^sk^o-ént
Initial accent *prk^sk^é-t, *prk^sk^ó-ent
Zero-grade (2) *prk^sk^é-t, *prk^sk^ó-nt,
Now this is the easy case: the thematic vowel was stressed here ab
origine, and was never subject to zero grade. The same goes for a
nominal type such as *mr.tós.
It gets more weird in the *bhér-e-ti, *bhér-o-nt / *h1ék^wos,
*h1ékwosyo type. There is no escaping the irregularity of the
thematic vowel there. If the pre-Ablaut form was *bhér-e-t,
*bher-é-ent the expected outcome would be +bhért(i), +bhrónt(i). If
we try to escape the premise (unstressed thematic vowels were not
reduced by zero grade) by hypothesizing that originally _all_ thematic
vowels were stressed (*bher-é-t, *bher-é-ent [this last form already
irregular in itself, as we would expect *bher-e-ént]), all we get is
+bhrét(i), +bhrónt(i). Still no good. Even if we push back thematic
vrddhi to the very origins of PIE (*bhe:r-é-t, *bhe:r-e-ént),
resulting in a promising *bhér-e-t(i), *bhér-o-nt(i) after the initial
accent rule, the second stage of the zero-grade rule would surely have
reduced that to +bhért(i), *bhéront(i). I suppose this *is* a step in
the right direction: now only zero-grade(2) needs doctoring to avoid
reducing unstressed morpheme-final /e/, while we can leave the main
zero-grade law free of thematic vowel weirdness (even if at the
expense of a vrddhi rule for some uses of the thematic vowel in
pre-Ablaut PIE). I'm not totally convinced it's the right solution,
though.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...