On Mon, 28 Jul 2003 20:50:54 +0100, Richard Wordingham
<
richard@...> wrote:
>I'll leave *a to Miguel - he's a
>collection of PIE *a he does _not_ attribute to PIE *h2.
There's mainly the influence of the back velars *k, *g, *gh (< *q, *Gh,
*G), which lowers a short /e/ to /a/, but probably not an /o/ or an /e:/
(same rules as for *h2, *h3, except that no lengthening obviously occurs
when *k etc. follow). However, the uvulars/velars also fail to lower a
good number of /e/'s which remain as /e/. My preliminary guess is that
those /e/'s derive from earlier **i and **u, and only **a (phonetic [&])
was affected.
That leaves a number of /a/'s which are not anywhere near a *h2 or a back
velar. Many of them are followed or may have been followed (as can be
deduced from other variants of the same root with /n/ or /m/) by a nasal
consonant (in a closed syllable). My speculation is that they derive from
nasalized variants of long **a: (> *o).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...