From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
Message: 33270
Date: 2004-06-21
On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 enlil@... wrote:
> Crabby Jens:
> > It can hardly be styled a problem or a false conclusion that the
> > analysis produces the attested result. The preforms you specify
> > yourself do not differ in any interesting way from my account. Both
> > explanations say that a vowel which would have become /e/ if it had
> > been accented changed into some other vowel which is later found
> > with o-timbre. For reasons not interesting to me anymore you choose
> > to speak of schwa and vowel shift, while I call them e and o, but
> > the message remains the same.
>
> Well, phonetically we must speak of [&] and its trivial lengthening
> because that is the most optimal thing that could have produced both
> mid-front *e and mid-back *o without violating universals on vowel
> shifts or creating unheard-of processes that are assuredly exotic.
>
> However I realize and now accept after pondering on the phonology at
> that stage of Schwa Diffusion that what I call *& must be phonemically
> (not phonetically however) understood as unaccented *a. So in a sense,
> we can say that unaccented *a (still phonetically [&]) became *e
> (simple fronting) before voiceless consonants, and *a (simple backing)
> before voiced stops.
It is absolutely wrong to make it appear that IE *e is always the product
of an unaccented vowel. What happened to the basic ablaut observation that
é/zero reflects the two accent variants of a common vowel?
> So everything is the same as I've stated already except that I now
> think it's safe to say that the schwa is phonemically unaccented *a.
> As such, regardless of accentuation on or off the vowel, there is always
> a two-way contrast of *e and *a in all positions in the early Late IE
> period. We have plural *-es (perhaps pronounced [*-Is]), but thematic
> nominative *-a-s [-&-s]. We must make the distinction otherwise
> grammatical chaos ensues.
>
> (To give an example to make sure I'm understood, the thematic nouns
> should then be understood as being [&] at this stage while written
> *-a-. So a thematic noun like *génha-s would be for what I've
> phonetically written out earlier as *génh&-s, later becoming *génhos
> on schedule after Vowel Shift.)
This appears to apply to neither the s-stem *g^énH1-os which is not
thematic, nor the thematic noun *g^ónH1-o-s which has -o- in the first
syllable. What roughly are you making sure is being understood here?
> There is no one-vowel system anywhere here. As I'm trying to get across,
> monovocalism is an illusion that has more to do with how the two vowels
> evolved, merged, split and remerged. It produces the effect which we see
> but this doesn't mean that there was ever a one-vowel stage that you
> could compare with the situation in Sanskrit. In Sanskrit, we see the
> simple merger of *e, *a and *o to *a. We don't see any such simple
> evolution in IE.
We do see a VERY monotonous root vocalism, so monotonous in fact as to
demand an explanation. What is that explanation under the correct theory
free of all the flaws of which I alone am found guilty?
A true monovocalic system is not excluded as an option for PIE. There are
a limited number of lexemes with other root vowels (better, perhaps,
first-syllable vowels) than //e//. There *may* be verbal roots also with
other vowels, but that could be remedied by accepting some non-optimal
root structures. You of course tell us which to choose all the time, but
you never give helpful arguments. The odd roots could be later additions
and so not relevant for an older stage for which a monovocalic system
could then indeed be the solution for roots. It would not help for the
thematic vowel, however. We need a special phonetic entity in the
thematic-vowel slot to get it to alternate in a way not shared with any
other vowels of the language. Given the descriptive fact that the thematic
vowel is just a vowel in stem-final position its special phonetic basis
must have come about at a time when something phonetically special could
be valid for stem-final vowels. I cannot see how a special pronunciation
can apply to vowels just because they are *stem*-final, but it is very
easy to see it could be the case if they were also *word*-final. That
leads to the conclusion that some originally word-final material took on a
pronunciation not seen elsewhere in the language and retained it even
after enclitic elements had become the inflectional endings as which we
know them.
If the clash of a differentiated root vocalism into the unitary vowel we
all but find happened before the univerbation of stems and desinences,
then the immediate prestage of the univerbation did have a one-vowel
system. But the clash may have occurred after the univerbation in which
case the system would then comprise not only the result of the clash,
generally referred to as *e by its least conditioned variant, but also the
special vowel of thematic suffixes, supposing that was a vowel. But only
if it *was* a vowel; it could just as well have been a sequence of a vowel
and some non-vocalic element, a possibility that may even have a higher
degree of probability. For if we are faced with something phonetically
special occurring only in word-final position it is likely to have been
produced by reduction. It is beginning to paint the picture of an
imperfect articulation in word-final position. We can only guess what it
may have been, but my candidate would be a glottal stop. It could also be
[h], but that seems taken by /H1/ already. So, if some phonetic material
was reduced to a glottal stop in word-final position, it may well have had
the effect of immunising the preceding vowel against the effects of the
accent, otherwise so devastating on unaccented vowels. I do not know if it
would make the vowel more susceptible to assimilatory influence from the
following segment in sandhi, but I would suppose that a vowel that is
somehow "disturbed" could indeed lose some of its independence.
All this takes us far too far back in time to be of any real value. We
must keep the thematic vowel out of the puzzle concerning the other vowels
since it goes by rules of its own. If it is a vowel at the time of the
clash, it keeps its independent status, and then the system has at least
two vowels. But as so often we do not know that.
> Rather, what I see is something that give the illusion
> of monovocalism. If what was once MIE *e becomes eLIE *a (after Syncope)
> and then splits up again to *e and *a (during Schwa Diffusion), later
> becoming *e and *o from Vowel Shift, that in itself will paint a
> compelling mirage of monovocalism without there being such a thing
> during any of these stages. In my account, the perceived monovocalism
> is perfectly explainable without requiring actual monovocalism in the
> theory. Very optimal this is, if I do say.
How can the assumption of splits be styled an explanation of an only
apparent monovocalism? Surely it would be even more obvious if there were
no splits. What is the idea of saying such nonsense?
Were there other vowels in your "MIE" than "*e", and if so, which ones?
What PIE distinctions do they correspond to?
> To this date, the only inefficiency you have exposed in my theory is
> the Final Voicing problem while I've exposed numerous problems in your
> account. In the end, optimality reigns supreme.
What is counter-optimal about a vowel system opposing [i] and [u] to a
third, non-high vowel? It would be like Arabic or the Eskimo of Greenland
and Canada. By the way, we were not discussing an account of mine, only
the question whether a one-vowel system should be banned as a possibility
even if it imposes itself with great vigour. I would like to keep the door
open for it at some level since we need an explanation for the blatant
inequalities in the distribution of the IE vowels. You have done nothing
to improve our understanding of this remarkable fact. I am not using the
potential acceptance of a one-vowel system for anything in my
morphophonemic analyses, nor do you apparently use your dismissal of it as
an argument anywhere. You are simply changing the subject, as you have
been doing also in the debate over the number of vowels. Every time I have
said "phonemes" you have slipped into phonetics, lecturing the list that,
in real phonetic terms, there is no such thing as a one-vowel system.
Well, hey, nobody said there was. Isn't that just supreme?
Jens