Re: ka and k^a [was: [tied] *kW- "?"]

Torsten:

> As Torsten kindly pointed out, /a/ as a phoneme is
> rather rare in English.

No way. In Standard Canadian English, the diphthong
"ai" is pronounced /aj/ -- that's a central vowel in
this case.

> While I think that /a/ was always a phoneme to some
> extent in IE, it need not be very common at all
> times.

I think that the relative rarity of *a in IE was
due to the process of Vowel Shift which caused most
previous *a's to be *o just before the breakup.


= gLeN




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