[tied] Re: Short and long vowels

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 39364
Date: 2005-07-21

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:

<snip>
> At this point, the PIE's came into contact with a people speaking
a non-PIE language, which occasioned two major changes: the
stress-accent was moved to the root-syllable; and reduced-grade vowels
and even stress-accented vowels not followed by /h/ or /?/ - here your
idea may have some application if vowels stress-accented vowels before
/h/ or /?/ were lengthened - became *A (the Ablaut vowel: *e/*o/*Ø;
possibly because this non-PIE language was tonal), i.e. zero-grade
came into play. The only possible /a/ in PIE was from *h/?a- or *ah/?.

<snip>
> Greek *V?/h became *V:; zero-grade *V: was *V.
>
> Non-Greek *V?/h, in zero-grade, became /H/, voiced /h/, then /a/.
*V?/h in full-grade became *V:.
>
> At least, this is a framework that can be analyzed though I
imagine it needs some tweaking.

Consider marking PIE 'zero-grade' as extra short. If we weren't
limited to Latin-1, I'd suggest writing a breve on top of the vowel.
As it is, you could capitalise them to indicate superscript, as in the
transliteration of the Hebrew hatephs. If you don't care for the
phonetic interpretation, think of it as mere spelling. I think the
notation would be helpfully suggestive, *if* you can think 'capital =
superscript'.

Talking of notation, we normally write the laryngeals h1, h2, h3 here
rather than H1, H2, H3 to avoid accidental confusion with aspiration.
Another notation is then hE, hA, hO, though the vowels are more
normally subscript. (This notation has been used to justify adding
the subscript vowels to Unicode!) Then, for those whose believe in 3
laryngeals, *h1 is the non-colouring (just arguably e-colouring)
laryngeal phoneme, *h2 is the a-colouring laryngeal, and *h3 is the
o-colouring laryngeal. Now in Hittite, *h1 vanishes (or is it /?/ -
perhaps worth a thread of its own), *h2 is /x/ (or something similar),
and *h3 varies between these two - I've read the conditioning, but I
have forgotten it. This is what I meant by 'apparent correlation of
vowel colour and Hittite consonant'.

Richard.