glen gordon wrote:
> Rob:
>> I am inclined to take all words with apparently
>> non-alternating /a/ to be loanwords borrowed after
>> IE had (re-)phonemicized /a/.
>
> Unnecessary hypothesis. There is nothing a priori
> "foreign" about *a. You can't have a vowel system
> without it!
>
>
> = gLeN
Really? And what about Hungarian? Among short vowels, we have only <a> (in
spelling) which is something like open o rather (anyway, it does not seem to
be equal to IPA low back rounded vowel).
And what about English, esp. British? Has it /a/?
Spoken Arabic has only the allophone [a] of the phoneme whose basic
pronunciation is [e] rather.
Late Common Slavic vowel system had not short "a" either. Yes, it was a
transitional state - and so it was with PIE. But *o > a in most PIE
branches, only Italo-Celtic and Greek preserved the old "o" unchanged.
Grzegorz J.
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