Me:
> Jens, I'm not your enemy, at least not all the time, and this is
> one of those cases where I understand what you're saying and I
> agree with it in a basic sense.
Jens:
> Sounds like a wolf dressed up as a sheep.
Zikwa URBARRA-as kistat? I'm only a wolf on Thursdays.
> Yes, but even so it proves the existence of a language that can
> engender such a debate. That has been denied.
Because you aren't debating, you're 'politigizing' (politics plus
strategizing) your point of view by warping facts and twisting
the meanings of your own rebuttals from post to post to the point
that I naturally have trouble following your nebulous point of view.
It has been 'denied' because ABSTRACT monovocalism, as opposed to
phonemic monovocalism, is without a purpose in this debate. Phonemic
monovocalism is unconnected to abstract monovocalism and the former
is most certainly unattested anyways. Everything here you've said so
far is incomprehensable.
> I would like to have an answer to the burning question raised by the
> strikingly monotonous PIE vocalism. Why are there so many roots with
> the vocalism /e/?
You're speaking only of the _verb_ and that has been purposely
made monotonous for a reason I gave earlier regarding early vowel
harmony between the verb root and transitive endings that would later
be used for a durative and aorist system. Even so, it's not reduced
fully to complete monotony so this is a bit of an exaggeration.
You simply assume that reduplication of the pattern *CeCoC- or stative
nouns in *-o- are meaningless because you are too unwilling to consider
that there is more than one vowel in pre-IE. Why? Because your base
conclusion is that preIE was monovocal. Why? I don't have a clue.
> And why so few with any other vocalism? Does hat fact not
> have a cause?
Yes, early vowel harmony.
> I don't know much about what is fact and what is fallacy in Nostratic,
> but we both know about the theory that Nostratic had a variety of
> vowels which collapsed into a single vowel in IE.
The fact is we know little about Nostratic in all honesty. We don't
know whether Nostratic had a "variety of vowels", whether it was
a simple three-vowel system or something else. We just don't know
because people aren't even reconstructing pre-IE properly! And I've
seen no mention whatsoever of anyone taking great pains to reconstruct
pre-Altaic or pre-Dravidian to any appreciable degree (oh yes, there's
McAlpin but...) So the above point means nothing because we are both
largely ignorant about it. I see little reason to have an extravagant
system in Nostratic and would rather propose three or four vowels to
be safe.
In Proto-Steppe, I've arrived at four: *i, *u, *& and *a. I used to
have three but then I noticed some words showing a pattern whereby
Boreal (Uralic, EA, CKam) has a back vowel *u but Altaic and
IndoEuropean seem to have underlying *a, hence Steppe *&. One of those
words would be *k&m "ten".
As I've said, in accented monosyllabic stems such as the verb *i- "to
go" or *bu- "to grow (up from the ground)", it became diphthongized to
ITyr *ei- and *beu- respectively with *e-vocalism in the durative due
to vowel harmony with its endings which also had *e (1ps *-em, 2ps *-es,
3ps *-e). Likewise vowel harmony with *a-vocalism occured in the
intransitive to agree with its endings in *a (*-ax, *-an, *-a). However
when the intransitive shifted to a 'perfect', it adopted an object marker
*-e (thus *-x-e, *-t-e, *-e) in order to extend its function beyond
just intransitive verbs. Outside of monosyllabic stems like those above,
*i normally became *e whereas *u, *& and *a merged to *a. Old IE further
reduced both *-e and *-a to *-a.
What I'm saying is that Proto-Steppe system indeed collapsed into a
more 'centralized' system in IndoTyrrhenian consisting of schwa *e and
*a. However, I still see no need to reduce it any further. It would
be problematic in explaining qualitative ablaut which is the most
ancient ablaut in IE.
In your case, we see the folly of the reduction when you feel forced to
remedy the RARE monovocalism with RARE double-long vowels... ???
Yeah, right. Good strategy. It's like a doctor saying, "Let's remedy this
broken arm by breaking the patient's other arm." Thankfully doctors have
laws that throw them in jail for that sort of thing but sadly not so for
comparative linguists. There are many criminal comparative linguists out
on the loose as a result. The libraries are no longer safe <:(
> I do not know if a single vowel is sufficient, but I see surprisingly
> little counterevidence, [...]
You can't see it because you dismiss it. Let's talk about reduplication
in the perfect some more, stative nouns and *o-grade verbs too.
So far I see your theory on them but nothing that compells me outright
to support them. Instead, you appear merely to have chosen one of a
slew of equally ('equally' being a loose word) plausible choices only
by random. I don't like random.
> The parallel with Sanskrit is really particularly striking. One may ask
> why there are so few vowels in Sanskrit, why only /a, a:/ when the other
> languages have /a, e, o, a:, e:, o:/?
It isn't so. We know it has /a/, /e/, /i/, /u/ and /o/ with long
counterparts. They are phonemically distinct vowels and very real.
Your question reifies an abstract analysis to the point that now, by
assuming that it is shown that Sanskrit is 'monovocalic' (although still
only in a very _shallow_ way and only by ignoring true phonemics and
examples against the analysis that other members of this List have
remembered from previous debates), you use it as the hypostasis of your
unsubstantiated interpretation.
> Well, that is not considered a silly question, for we know the answer:
> there was a major collapse of vowel timbres.
Of course there was, but the question is how this was done and how
big of a collapse was it. It's not a stupid question but there are
stupid answers out there.
> Why is it stupid to parallelize with the vowel collapse of Sanskrit
> and consider the possibility that there had been a similar reduction
> of vowel timbres in the prehsitory of PIE?
Aaah. So is this what you're trying to say? That then I don't object
to, as long as it is kept seperate from an insistence on phonemic
monovocalism. However, I still think that it wasn't reduced to a single
vowel during the IndoTyrrhenian stage that you're speaking of because
of vowel harmony. This is, I feel, the ultimate origin of ablaut, the
seed that would start a chain-reaction of ablaut in IE with some
remnants in Tyrrhenian.
> Right or wrong, the theory of a pre-PIE vowel collapse would explain the
> absence of a varied vocalism in PIE, especially on the lexical level
> (in roots).
Yes, in part. Not in entirety.
> If it reflects a real event of reduction in the vocalic variety it
> may also explain that there apparently *are* a limited number of roots
> with /a/ or /o/ as their fundamental vowel. They may be words that
> entered the language *after* the presumed vowel collapse[...]
Or they could be genuine words with a genuine vowel that was alternative
to *e, thereby indicating what the evidence shows to both of us: pre-IE
stages were never monovocalic nor was the system reduced to one vowel
in the same way that Sanskrit reduced *e, *a and *o to *a. Rather, ITyr
had reduced Proto-Steppe vowels to at least _two_ (*e and *a), the very
seed of ablaut.
> I would envisage these possibilities even without a typological
> parallel, but since I was provoked and ridiculed for not having a
> parallel I pulled the ace from my sleeve. Sanskrit is such a language,
> i.e. an imperfect, or close-to-perfect, yet a little bit flawed,
> one-vowel language on the level of abstract phonology.
... Which isn't a parallel afterall because it is only ABSTRACTLY
monovocalic at best. I'm not trying to ridicule you. I'm just trying
to burn you a little with my hot iron. Is that cruel? Perhaps. Sometimes
the dominatrix in me likes to get out.
= gLeN