At 7:54:57 PM on Monday, May 24, 2004, elmeras2000 wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:
>> Therefore, I object to anyone who tries to reason that if IE can
>> be analysed as underlyingly monovocalic (which may or may not be
>> justified in itself) then that implies that pre-IE must have had
>> only one vowel.
> No, that's a complete distortion of your own conduct in
> message 32876: You expressly excluded the *possibility* of
> monovocalic systems. In no uncertain terms you wrote:
> "one-vowel systems are _NON-EXISTENT_. It's not even
> considerable."
Correction: 32876 is your post responding to Glen's
statement in 32869, in which he wrote:
Likewise, that IE might be analysed as technically
"monovocalic" means nothing to the question of the shape
of the pre-IE vowel system. In fact, since sensible
linguists are bound by language universals to reconstruct
protolanguages properly, might we please keep remembering
that one-vowel systems are _NON-EXISTENT_. It's not even
considerable.
I see nothing wrong with this statement. Piotr commented in
22560 that it's the 'level of systematic PHONETICS' [my
emphasis] that determines the typology, and I assume that
Glen is using 'one-vowel system' in the typological sense,
and in that sense, to the best of my knowledge, they are
indeed non-existent.
Brian