Re: Nominative: A hybrid view

Hi Rob,

> > Yes. Most generally, all speech should have been just tone in
> > the beginning.
>
> Ah, excellent. While I disagree that the earliest language

should've

> been completely tonal, I do think that there was some stage of PIE
> that had a tonal accent.

Yes, that's almost what I was trying to say. I think tone played a
role in the forming of language. More than it does now. But it is
interesting how this will relate to the Iranian languages' sort of
melodious "stress" (btw, they don't even have such a concept in our
traditional sense) whereby the rhythm of the sentence is simply born
out of the sequence long-short vowels. No actual stresses.

> 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.

Well, I also think you will find it hard to explain palatalisation in
Sanskrit against this theory. Palatalisation took place, supposedly,
before /e/ (as in skr. ca < *k^we, lat. que), which authomatically
means /e/ turned into /a/ later. I don't know about any other
theories offering something else as an explanation.

Eva