Well I'm packed and ready to go but not gone yet so I may as well
answer this, to my own chagrin...
Jens:
> No, that's a complete distortion of your own conduct in message
> 32876: You expressly excluded the *possibility* of monovocalic
> systems.
They don't exist. I refuse to discuss vampires and werewolves with you.
> I have never made such an assumption,
Then what the hell is the basis of your pre-IE theory? Do you even know?
In reconstructing ancestral forms of IE, we both depart from differing
initial conclusions. An examination of these 'initial conclusions' is
important in evaluating which competing theory is the best. Obviously,
the best one has the strongest foundation (ie: the soundest observation),
the conclusion that eliminates the most unknowns to answer our question
most efficiently and thoroughly.
The basis of my theories should be understood by now as deriving from a
single common-sense deduction that unintuitive accent alternations between
stem and suffix were once regular at some point in "pre-IE". There is
simply no denying that this MUST be so. It doesn't tell us when such a
stage occured but it MUST be so, even if it's a million years ago. This
is my initial conclusion and it is an inevitable one. From this conclusion,
I arrived at the Penultimate Accent Rule which later turned out to be
a predictable quasi-penultimate accent. Others may arrive at something
other than this to explain the unpredictable accent, but there's no
denying the soundness of the conclusion.
You've made clear, in contrast, that the foundation of your views rely
on your 'abstract analysis' of the IE vowel system. However, your
analysis, just like the same analysis on Sanskrit, is not guaranteed
to have any bearing on the vowel system of its prestage. Therefore, your
'initial conclusion' is immediately and obviously flawed. The conclusion
that the analysis _does_ have bearing is disproven by Sanskrit and
our knowledge of IE. As a result, your methodology demonstrably involves
picking a solution by random without eliminating any unknowns. It is
fair then to immediately dismiss your views altogether from the onset
and choose the competing hypothesis that _is_ based on a sound
conclusion.
= gLeN