Re: [tied] PIE Stop System

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" <jer@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 14, 2003 6:38 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] PIE Stop System

> If there was a Sanskrit-type collapse of a number of vowels into (the
> prestage of) /e/ in some prestage of the IE protolanguage, we would find
> all the old vowels as /e/. But if there was some time between that event
> and the spread of IE, the language could have had time to absorb or invent
> new words with other vocalisms.

So you do find it possible that at a period there was only one phonemic
vowel in PIE? Many linguists do not want to accept that possibility because
of the typological reasons (although there were some analysis of the
supposed one vowel phoneme-languages in Caucasus) in spite of the fact that
there are a lot of facts which point in that direction - most stems having
*e vocalism and those which do not have it seeming younger, three velar
series (*K, *K', *Kw) which would point to the palatalisation and
labialisation of velars being the way of preserving the distinctions of
prior neuter-front-back vowel which have all collapsed to *e, maybe some
loans into IE like Semitic *sab?atum > *septm etc.

> The deviating
> items do not all have to be younger words, though most probably are; there
> could also have been restrictions to the vowel collapse rule which left
> the old vowel qualities unchanged (or differently changed) under special
> conditions. Thus, if 'nose' and 'salt' are *na:s-, *sa:l- with old long
> /a:/ and no laryngeals as I have supposed (rightly or wrongly), they may
> have simply retained their original vowels because the vowel collapse rule
> only applied to short vowels.

But why these words? How do you then explain the Vollstufe/Nullstufe
alternation in these words easily explained wtih *eh2/h2? Doesn't Lith.
nósis (with acute, from *neh2s-) and Slavic nos7 (from *nh2s-) just demand
to be reconstructed with a laryngeal (also Slavic sol7 < *sh2l- and Lat.
sa:l < *seh2l-)?

Mate