Re: [tied] Nominative: A hybrid view

On Fri, 23 May 2003, fortuna11111 wrote:

> Hi Jens,
>
> > This is not correct: /-d/ and /-t/ are not interchangeable
> > (neutralized) in PIE,
>
> They are listed as separate phonemes.

Yes; what I mean is that /d/ and /t/ were even opposed to each other in
word-final position in PIE, or at least in that prestage of it in which
the "thematic vowel" was split up into /e/ and /o/ depending on the
phonetic character of the following segment (being /o/ before [+voice],
/e/ elsewhere). The two phonemes, however, *are* neutralized in
Indo-Iranian and Italic. It is often forgotten, even in historical
grammars, that Sanskrit is incapable of showing whether a final stop was
voiced or voiceless, since the opposition is neutralized in *all* sandhi
position.

>
> >but they are in Indo-Iranian and in Italic.
>
> But if you take the case of a voiced vowel becoming voiceless at
> the end of a word, you will end up with lots of languages on the
> list. Isn't this simply a case of allophones and why should this
> exclusively concern the phoneme-system of PIE?

I take this to read "consonant". If *-d and *-t are opposed to each other
in PIE, there is a phonemic contrast even in that position. A form like
*kWod > PGmc. *hwat (Germ. was) would appear to reflect the old voicing,
if in a funny way.

> Some of the
> discussion puzzles me somewhat. It could be simply that I did
> not manage to follow the thread from the beginning.
>
> > > And I don't want to petty about the vowel quantity because it is
> > > observed to be short as Eva has even kindly pointed out.

>
> I have not pointed it out.

The quote is not from a post of mine.

> At first it was a joke and self-irony, then
> I just ended up with another question in my mind. The vowel in
> Abl. Sg. m/n is long, but it does include a thematic vowel plus /a/,
> or it could be an /a:/. Sanskrit alone, I guess, does not allow any
> conclusions on the length of the vowel. Hence my questions
> stated in another email. Not to mention that, I am wondering why
> this particular ending in Abl. Sg. is taken as indicative of the
> ending in PIE. I would appreciate any ideas.

It is a very good candidate for a direct reflexion of the PIE abl.sg. form
of o-stems because it matches Latin lupo:, older -o:d, Oscan -ud very
well. It apparently also matches the gen.sg. of o-stems in Balto-Slavic,
Lith. vil~ko, OCS vlUka. Recently the Celtiberian form has been found to
be -uz (perhaps with a fricative d at the end). It may aso be identical
with the Greek adverb type seen in kalo:~s 'beautifully' (except for the
-s which may have been taken over from other stem-classes which used the
genitive form also as ablative). Greek and Lihuanian and partly Vedic
agree on a disyllabic scansion /-VVD/, but the vowel has a-timbre in
Baltic and o-timbre in Italic, Celtic and Greek. That could all be argued
to reflect a post-PIE contraction of a disyllabic sequence *-o-at (or
*-o-ad). If the same morpheme is contained in *(h1)e-t 'and, thereafter'
which has the variant *(h1)e-t-i (Latin et), the dental stop is found to
be a /t/.

Jens