[tied] Re: Short and long vowels

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "elmeras2000" <jer@...> wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
> <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
> <jer@...>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Both scholars also showed, immediately assisted
> > > by Rix, that some of the analogical explanations for schwa
> reflected as
> > > Greek /e/ and /o/ are morphologically impossible, and that there
> > > consequently is no possibility of accounting for the Greek
> laryngeal
> > > reflexes by a PIE inventory containing less than three
> laryngeals.
> >
> > I didn't think the number of PIE contrasts was the issue. I
> > understood that Patrick's thesis was that the contrast lay not in
> the
> > laryngeal itself, but in the quality of the associated vowel. Thus
> > *&1, *&2 and *&3 would phonetically include an oral vowel, and the
> > distinction lie in that vowel rather than any associated consonant.
>
> I understood yoour brave attempt to read some sense into his posting
> that way of course; he apparently did not. Now, the examples I chose
> did not have any vowels in the relevant segments in PIE: The PPP's
> *wr.H1-tó-s, *k^r.H2-tó-s, *gWr.H3-tó-s had a syllabic /r/ followed
> by fricatives, not by schwa. Since there are three different results
> here too there must have been three different fricatives, unless one
> posits three different varieties of "sonant r" in PIE. And in
> parallel fashion then three different qualities of sonant l, sonant
> n, and sonant m; add to this the necessity of three different
> qualities of /i/ and /u/ to account for the cases where iH1/2/3 and
> uH1/2/3 give Greek i:/ja:/jo: and u:/wa;/wo:. Add also the knowledge
> that the laryngeals had not vanished since they count for segments
> in the working of Hirt's Law in Balto-Slavic. It is a pity we do not
> know the regular outcomes of *R.H1/2/3 in Anatolian. I do not know
> what to make of Hittite daluki- 'long', dalukasti- 'length' from
> *dl.H1gh-V-. The treatment of the syllabic resonants varies so much
> from branch to branch that the IE point of departure is pretty
> clear: it was simply a sonant sandwiched between consonants or
> between a consonant and a word boundary. When the development of
> secondary vowels shows three different vowel qualities in the later
> life of these segments in Greek, that is proof definite of the
> existence of three different spirants to impart these qualities.

Why does one need trios of resonants if there be only one laryngeal?
Why can't one just have three varieties of 'furtive vowel'? The
varying developments of British English _secretary_ to, for example,
/'sekritri/ and /'sek&tri/ spring to mind as an example of how varied
developments may be. I'm still not persuaded that Patrick's basic
thesis is disprovable within non-Anatolian Indo-European - it struck
me as unfalsifiable. If R.hx could become RVhx, why couldn't there
always have been a vowel there?

Richard.