Jens:
>That just is not fair: You are asking for a catalogue of thousands upon
>thousands of forms to demonstrate that one can get through the wordforms of
>Sanskrit without ever opposing two vowels to each other.
What's not fair is explaining everything with "shadow consonants". What
stops us from using the same arguement on English, or Farsi, or Hakka?
Any language can be monovocalic then.
>Actually that is all the extreme theory says, and it is in my view quite
>close to being correct, at least so close as create the need for an
>explanation why the distribution of vowels in PIE roots is so drastically
>uneven.
I think something along the lines of my own explanation is reasonable.
It seems that *a is largely the result of lowered *e (and if my labial
theory is correct, from *o as well). So if *a can be deduced to be
originally an allophone of the other two, we are left with *e and *o.
Yet this is an unbalanced system. Therefore, without introducing
other assumptive vowels, the system must derive from a centralized
one of *@ (*>e) and *a (>*o). We know that *e and *o oppose
each other in IE because of roots like *reg- "ruler" versus *pod-
"foot" so this is why I don't understand the point the monovocalists
are trying to make.
- gLeN
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