--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...>
wrote:
> Is the sound /a/ considered to be an original phoneme of Proto-
Indo-European? [...]
Everything is considered and accepted by some. If you mean, do
individual list-members consider /a/ an original PIE phoneme, the
answer for me is yes and no.
Yes, I must accept /a/ as a PIE phoneme, since it sometimes occurs
in environments where it would cause even greater embarrassment to
posit /H2e/ or /eH2/. Some examples are *yag^- 'sacrifice', *sal-
'salt', *na:s- 'nose', but there are not many.
And No, I do not consider /a/ a very old member of the PIE phonemic
system. It does not reveal any complementary distribution over and
against the immensely common /e/, so it seems that items with truly
independent /a/ (i.e. /a/ not from /e/ by influence from *H2 or
plain velars) are simply secondary additions to the vocabulary
introduced after a preceding clash of whatever older vowels there
have been into the monotonous /e/.
The vowel system indicated by the PIE lexicon is one of a single
vowel phoneme (later surviving as /e/ where not changed by special
rules). That has been considered reason enough to reject it by many.
While it is true and remarkable that no language is really known to
make do with a single vowel phoneme, it is not very remarkable that
no language has been recorded in precisely the stage when it has
just merged all its vowels and has not yet moved on to create new
ones. Old Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit, Avestan, Old Persian) comes close,
but by the time of the oldest records there have been changes that
demand some diversity to be posited for the phonemic system. But if
the period before the emergence of the earliest differentiated
vowels was a short one, that is only to be expected.
Jens