Jens:
> You still appear to be missing the point that we were in fact
> talking morphophonemics.
I think you're missing points on things too.
> Somewhere along the line lies the observation that, in IE *roots*,
> there is a tremendous preponderance of the vocalism /e/ which must
> be taken stock of in any account of the grammar.
You wish to equate patterns seen in IE and those seen in Sanskrit
together as if they are equal but this remains misleading. For
one thing, in Sanskrit /e/ and /o/ can be reduced to diphthongs
with *a such that everything is almost perfectly 'monovocalic'.
Alright. As I said, this is a misnomer since, with /i/ and /u/, the
language was never such a thing but no matter, we can do this if it
titulates us so and get away with it, I guess.
In IE, things are a little different and that minute difference
matters. For example, you say there is a "preponderance of *e" as
you say and that this is similar to Sanskrit /a/ and yet, if *e
is from earlier *a, and *o is merely a lengthened version of this
vowel, then what is *e: and *o:? Surely *o is a lengthened version
of *o... making it an absurd double-long monstrosity but that
leaves out *e:. Oh maybe we need a triple-long vowel too. Etc, etc,
etc. It's dumb and doesn't account for the real IE vowel system as
it appears to be. We don't run into this problem in Sanskrit, and this
is what makes it tough to argue against. The point is, taking away
/i/ and /u/, Sanskrit really DOES have a single vowel /a/ with a
long counterpart /a:/ and it's a very elegant solution indeed.
However, you take away IE *i and *u, and you still have *e and *o
which cannot be the same vowel because we would be led to a
disorganized view of preIE with a pile of rarities and unicorns.
As we've discussed earlier, my theory may not be as vocalically
elegant as you would like because I simply derive *e from earlier
*e and *o from *a (both with long counterparts as we find in IE), but
I avoid many of the unicorns you feel unashamed to theorize. The only
real problem we've found with any unlikelinesses in my account of
PreIE concern the Final Voicing rule. Even if I accepted *z (which
I won't) this is still much better than a theory than what you
offer with this monovocalic nightmare.
So this is NOT THE SAME. I've never been able to make sense of how
your analyses work and you only help the misunderstanding by purposely
avoiding any of your pre-IE reconstructions (because you would only get
into trouble with your own logic, I suspect, if you were to expose such
things). The reconstructions can only be awkward and unlike any real
language. Fine for robots but IE speakers didn't know about Pentium
processors.
> Like you said, if I understood you, that has no immediate
> repercussions for the prehistory of either Sanskrit or PIE. It does,
> however, affect the situation indirectly, since it extinguishes the
> red light.
Define 'extinguishes the red light'. It doesn't sound like a valid
English idiom. What red light?
= gLeN