Re: [tied] Re: Nominative: A hybrid view

On Mon, 2 Jun 2003, Rob wrote:

> [...]
> Did you see what Jens said regarding Sanskrit and
> monovocality? Although Sanskrit is not a monovocalic language, it
> has /a/ where PIE has /e/, /o/, or /a/. This raises two
> possibilities:
>
> 1. Sanskrit levelled all prior e/o (Ablaut) alternations.
>
> 2. Sanskrit's immediate ancestor and its relatives (presumably, the
> entire Indo-Aryan group) broke off from PIE before the Ablaut
> occurred.
>
> Choice #2 seems controversial, but there is evidence for it besides
> what's mentioned above. Sanskrit has PIE /ei/, /oi/, /ai/ > /e/,
> and /eu/, /ou/, /au/ > /o/. It seems more logical to me that
> Sanskrit's ancestor(s) broke off of PIE before Ablaut, and thus never
> had /ei/, /oi/, /eu/, or /ou/, but simply /ai/ and /au/, which can
> easily turn into /e/ and /o/, respectively.

Hold your horses! You're bombing the field back to the time before the
neogrammarians. What happened to the "Palatalgesetz" which was "in the
air" in the 1870's and has been common knowledge in the field ever since?
Indo-Iranian has palatalization before /a/ from *e, but not before /a/
from *a and *o; it also has lengthening of the reflex of *o in open
syllables, not of the reflex of *e and *a (Brugmann's Law).

Jens