Re: [tied] The sectors of ablaut.

From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 21679
Date: 2003-05-10

On Sat, 10 May 2003 00:31:25 +0200 (CEST), Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
<jer@...> wrote:

>To get over the stalemate in the quarrel over ablaut I shall have to
>point out a number of things I do not find occasion to say if I only
>respond to the posts of others.
>
>It appears to be fundamental that the three main parts of the IE
>inflected word have their own limits of vocalism:
>
>Roots may have any vocalism, long or short; while by far the most common
>root vowel is /e/ or /e:/, also /a/, /a:/, /o/ and /o:/ appear to be
>represented. (I am not so sure about the long /u:/ of 'mouse' anymore.)

Are you unsure about the length or about the u-ness?
What about /i/ and /i:/?

>Suffixes only have /e/ (and what comes from that source).

Well, isn't that begging the question? What we observe is that
suffixes can have at least e, o, e:, o:, i, u, and zero.

>Endings may have any vocalism, but only short: /e, o, a, i, u/.

I'm trying to think of an ending with /a/... What are you referring
to?

>Thus there was no accent shift in the
>strong cases in *-z, -Ø, *-m, MF.du. *-h3, nom.pl. *-zs, acc.pl. *-ms,
>ntr.du. *-yh1, or coll. *-h2, nor in the active sg. verbal endings *-m,
>*-s, *-t, while there was accent movement before all the other endings
>which formed syllables.

I'm not sure if the ntr.du. is originally a strong ending. In
isolated where analogy is unlikely, we see for instance
*(d)wi-(d)k^m.t-íh1 "twenty".

> A stem ending in the thematic vowel could be further extended by
>suffixes and so did not always occupy final position of the full stem.
>The thematic vowel rule also worked in the position before added
>suffixes, as opt. *bhér-o-yh1-t, but stative *séne-h1- 'be old'. Thus,
>these stem-final or suffix-final vowels must have retained their
>special feature down to a time following the main ablaut reduction by
>which /-eh1-/ was reduced to /-h1-/ because not accented and then
>selected /-e-/ as the form of the preceding thematic vowel.

But the o-stem endings select *o before a subsequently reduced vowel
(*-o-esyo > *-osyo). Why not analyze *sen-éh1-?


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...