--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...>
wrote:
> Is the sound /a/ considered to be an original phoneme of Proto-
Indo-European? Or is it only the result of laryngeal colouring of
former *e (or *o?). In the vocabularies I have seen of Indo-
European, /a/ is especially frequent initially and before and
after /k/ (and sometimes /g/ or /gh/ - usually the velar stops, but
sometimes also the palatals). This suggests that it is a colouring
of another vowel (probably *e) in the vicinity of guttural
consonants, including the vanished laryngeal H2. But is there any
evidence that there was an original /a/ independent of surrounding
sounds? I know that postulated *a is rare in verb roots outside of
initially and near /k g gh/, but if one looks at attested IE
languages, one finds that /a/ seems quite frequent in Latin. What
explains /a/'s frequency in Latin? Where also does Celtic (Irish,
Welsh, Breton, Scots) /a/ come from (besides syllabic m and n
becoming am, an)? Is it common in these languages, or relatively
infrequent, since it was
> relatively infrequent in PIE? The same remarks and questions
apply to the diphthongs *ai and *au, which seem to be common only
initially and after /k/, although in Latin ae and au are not
infrequent. What explains these diphthongs' frequency in Latin?
>
> I invite any and all to reply to my questions.
>
The ablaut vowel of PIE might have been aa /a/ in pre-PIE. IE
speakers invaded Europe in several waves, separated by centuries. In
the languages of the last wave, the ablaut proces was finished, but
in the languages of earlier waves it might not have been. Therefore,
if a last-wave IE language borrows a word from their previous-wave
substrate that might contain an /a/, a vowel whose place had been
vacated by the ablaut process in the borrowing language. Cf. the
situation in English where /a/ exists only in borrowed words
like 'spa' (except for a few cases: father, rather etc).
Palatal stops might in PIE have been alternating k/c^ and labiovelar
stops alternating kW/k, depending on context (especially the one of
ablaut e/o), later regularised as /c^ /> /s^/ > /s/ and /k/ in satem
languages and regularised (depalatised) as /k/ and /kW/ in centum
languages. Words borrowed fron a not-yet-ablauted language would
have non-alternating velar stops. Hence the association between
velar stops and /a/.
Torsten