Peter:
> Amid the confusion, I think you misunderstood what he's saying. He's
> saying you can't analyse Hebrew or Arabic as monovocalic, not that you
> can!
Yes, I understood perfectly and this was the point I wanted to emphasize
because, just like with Hebrew and Arabic which have 'ablauting'
patterns evocative of IE's, we still can't reduce things like this.
There has to be a limit to the insanity. So this was my point on making
such abstract analyses on IE and concluding that since *e is common,
we should derive *o from *e as well. No, we don't have to. We can say
no to drugs. There's no logical arguement that says we MUST do so and
there is nothing wrong with the IE vowel system that should give us
such an obsessive desire to 'repair' it.
= gLeN