The palatal sham :) (Re: [tied] Re: Albanian (1))

>
> >[...] I think there was no real phoneme *a in PIE
>
> Think all you want. It's incorrect. Not only is the lack of *a in
> a vowel system completely unattested in all known languages
> (at least human ones), you simply cannot wave away such a
> common root as *kap- "grasp, hold, have". It is far too secure to
> ignore.

English. What used to be, and still is written as <-a-> is now an
ablaut series |eI, ä, &|. All occurrences of proper /a/ in English
are loans (eg. <spa>).

Torsten