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

>LIV was not my source

You said:
"The root *mad- (thus LIV) ... The root *bhag- (thus LIV) ..."
so perhaps the impression I had that you were using LIV as your source is
understandable.

>>It is still possible to ask if *a actually does
>> alternate with /o/ and zero.
>Well, zero is no problem:

Yes, I accept that there are some examples here.

>-a-/-o- is harder. ..

Yes. There are some interesting suggestions. But it still remains
interesting that the case for /e~o~zero/ is incontrovertible, whereas that
for /a~o~zero/ is difficult to prove, and at best we can find examples of
one grade in one language, and another in another - almost nowhere do we
find a language showing the use of this patterning, in the way that we can
easily show for /e~o~zero/.

My original comment was to suggest that it is inappropriate to say PIE had a
/u o a e i/ vowel pattern. I believe that still holds true: the vowel
/e~o~zero/ patterns morphophonemically differently from /a/, and both are
different from the syllabic allophones of resonants. So a simple statement
"it had these vowels" is inadequate.

>I wonder why Toch.B keme 'melody' does not count?

I didn't say it didn't. I ignored it because we don't have the -a- form in
Tocharian B (as far as I know). And if these noun forms regular have -o- in
Ur-Toch, we can't show that this word is not -o- by analogy.

>It should be remembered, of course, that the various types of "o-
>grade" are not all equivalent. It is entirely possible that roots
>with the vowel *-a- participate in some alternations with -o-, but
>not in others.

Yes. The evidence is too slight; but I do now accept that I can't prove
these alternations do not exist. However I think I can still argue that
these alternations with /a/ are hard to prove convincingly.

>The lack of evidence makes what little we
>do have very precious, and it should be remembered that discounting
>the evidence consistently is every bit as ad hoc as accepting it
>uncritically.

Yes - a good point.

>Why would the language allow *néw-o-s, *néw-e-syo, *néw-a-H2,
>but not *H2ág^-e-ti, §*H2og^-ó-s ?

*new-a-H2 is a phonetic construction, but (at one stage in the language) not
a phonemic one; whereas *H2ág^-e-ti, §*H2og^-ó-s is phonemic. You could
say that *néw-a-H2 does not "actually" exist, and is "really" *new-e-H2. So
your problem disappears.

>We know now that the latter
>form was actually *o-H2g^-ó-s,

I like the explanation for Greek, but what is this o-H2g^-o-s? What is the
initial o-?

Peter