Jens:
>Tee-hee, as I have said a number of time already, Sanskrit *is*
>monovocalic in exactly the sense of the most extremist view of PIE. That,
>however, does not force PIE to be so also.
Yes, I remember, unfortunately. However, I also recall resistance
to that idea and it all depends on what your definition of monovocalism
is. I'm refering to the number of distinct (ie: contrastive) vocalic
phonemes exist in a language. There is no language I know of
where there is one distinct vowel, not even Sanskrit. People
had tried with Kabardian too but this failed.
Sanskrit is not monovocalic in this sense because there ARE contrasts
and we can see quite clearly that the language has five short vowels
"a", "e", "i", "o" and "u" with long counterparts.
A single minimal pair like "Shivah/Shivaah" suffices to prove that your
statement is false and that Sanskrit is _not_ monovocalic.
- gLeN
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