Re: [tied] PIE Stop System

On Mon, 15 Sep 2003, aquila_grande wrote:

> I think the collapse rather was into an a (with the allophoneme @),
> than an e.

I said "into (the prestage of) /e/". That was meant as a careful
formulation of what we can know.

> Then there was a periode when this a* changed to e, to o or remained
> a according to phonetic surroundings. When the phonetic conditions
> changed according to flectional form, this created the e/o-umlaut.I
> think it is very difficult to explain the e/o-umlaut originating
> from an e.

I believe these difficulties can be overcome (but so they can if we
depart from [a]).

> Even though there was a collapse, the wovels u and i probably did
> not collapse, and probably existed before the periode of
> quantitative umlaut. There exist stems with u and i without this
> umlaut, and many quantitative umlauts may have emerged due to
> analogy.

There were not many *vowels* /u/ and /i/. The overwhelming majority of
occurrences have full grade with /we, ye/ or /ew, ey/. The /u/ and /i/ of
u-stems and i-stems are (always or mostly?) accentual variants of the
thematic vowel and therefore themselves products of the events we lump
together as ablaut (sic).

Jens