Re: [tied] Unreality...

>But still, with inheirited
> *i and *u, plus vocalic nasals and liquids, Sanskrit never had a chance
> of ever being monovocalic at any point in its past. Do you agree?

Yes, at the phonetic level.

>There
> was always a vowel other than /a/ at every stage right up to Sanskrit
> and this conforms properly with the known universals.
> So this remains a frivolous level of abstraction that goes nowhere. What
> does this prove?

But every vowel except /a/ has a non-vocalic allophone. Now that is simply
not true of English or most other languages. That is why the discussion
does go somewhere, and why it proves that mono-vocalic analyses are not
bizarre. As for the universals, Sanskrit would fit with them better than
PIE, simply because the monovowel is /a/. That's why some folks are
persuaded that the reconstructed /e/ of breaking-up PIE, which must have
been /e/ when it hits Sanskrit, must have been phonemic /a/ at some stage.

Peter