[tied] Re: IE lexical accent

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:

> Anybody paying attention knows that
> I know about these wonderfully kooky languages. However, I just

don't see

> it happening for EA or any prestage of EA (or any prestage of IE

for

> that matter), which was my original objection.

I'm sure many of us have other things to do besides keeping track of
what you know. That you don't see it happen here may be based on a
blockage in your perception. It has certainly been shown to you.
Syllabic structure is one of the many things that can change over
time. Therefore it does not matter much what kind of language you
believe EA, IE or Uralic was at some other time. What matters is
what the facts demand.

> Either EA was a CV(C) type language like Uralic et alius, or it

was a

> language derived from such a pattern, perhaps something that may

have gone

> so far as to allow CVCC based on the evidence you cite. More than

that

> however, I have to doubt.

I can't believe that EA had some vowelless

> stage where **natRm was allowed. Afterall, we have to then ask

ourselves

> what on earth the rules are for syllable shape here.

They would be so as to allow this. The question is an empty one and
can be answered by a simple tautology.

> I don't see it.

No, I haven't told you about the details. I wrote a book about it,
but the matter does not belong on this list.

> > I have assumed the same for pre-IE,
>
> "Assumed", yes. And all that I can say is that you ignore the fact

that

> almost all of these vowelless suffixes like *-s, *-i, *-t, etc are
> derivable from demonstratives. That's an uncanny pattern which is

doubly

> supported by the parallelism of their morphological functions in

both

> free and bound form.

That "fact" (even if such it is) is neutral in this respect. There
are many cases of reduction of heavy clusters in the prehistory of
IE. The loss of unaccented short vowels caused massive clustering,
and some have had a fate involving much more than mere sonant
vocalization or vowel insertion. I have been asked by a few to
present my views on this, and I'll come back to it. But most of it
is actually quite well known.

> > Off topic for this list, there is no evidence for suffixal

status of

> > the last consonant of either *natR- or *aluR- in Eskimo.
>
> Alright but then why are there so many q-terminating stems in

Inuktitut

> then. If it doesn't end in -q, it apparently ends in -k. We

have /qayaq/,

> /iseq/ and /umiaq/ for example. That must mean something. My

spidey senses

> tell me that ProtoSteppe was much like IE in the sense that it had

an

> overwhelming majority of roots that were CVC. I think just as IE
> inheirited this pattern, so did EA and Uralic. So this all seems to
> suggest that this *-R was a suffix for whatever purpose.

Not at all. Stems cannot end in very many different phonemes: for
nouns there are only -a, -i, -u, -&, -R, -G, while verbal stems may
also end in *-c-. The inergative has no inflectional ending, so this
produces words ending in -a, -i, -u, -&, -q, and -k (and *-t&
produces -n). There is no detectable suffix status to the final
consonant of most words ending in velars or uvulars. You might as
well assign suffixal status to the few consonants words can end with
in Spanish.

Could it ease your pain that the analysis of the type nat&q as /natR-
/ was not made by me, but by Robert Underhill?

Jens