From: mkelkar2003
Message: 36935
Date: 2005-04-06
>Please refer to the following article by Nicholas Kazanas
> --- 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