a

As I understand the short-and-long-vowel saga, Patrick rejects the
classical view of IE vowels since he doesn't like the idea of a
single-vowel language.

But no matter what you do to the laryngelas, this fact remains: all
PIE verbs and nouns have root ablaut. That means the root vowel was
the ablaut vowel. That vowel was /a/ in pre-PIE. So all verbs and
nouns roots had the vowel /a/. Not nice.

But suppose pre-PIE was a three-vowel language: /i/, /a/, /u/

Under certain conditions (no stress, stress, unknown),
/a/ > nothing, /e/, /o/

Under the same set of conditions
/i/ > /i/, /ei/, /oi/

And, under the same set of conditions
/u/ > /u/, /eu/, /ou/

None of this is phonetically implausible. Re the reflexes of /i/
and /u/, cf the inflection of nominal i- and u- stems.

We now have something that is identical to the classical view of
PIE, except that the striking similarity between the three series of
reflexes is spurious (but nonetheless real). The question is what
the PIEers made of this. How was it changed into a system? Vennemann
assumes Semitic influence to account for the systematicness of
Germanic ablaut in verbs, maybe this is the case here too?


The problem of this analysis (ie starting from the zero grade) is
how to account for i- and u- ablaut in the other direction,
namely /i/, /ie/, /io/ and /u/, /ue/, /uo/



Torsten