Grzegorz:
> a.. i, a, u were long vowels;
> a.. e, o were short vowels;
>
> Haven't you noticed it? What is the difference
> between e and o in the vertical dimension?
What are you talking about? In this case, it seems
clear to me that "long" cannot truly mean "long"
so much as "primary" or "non-reduced". There's a
difference. Take Uralic where there are primary
vowels seen only in the automatically stressed
first syllable of a word, and then secondary or
"reduced" vowels in the unstressed syllables.
This has nothing to do with phonemic length. Phonemic
length must be proven by way of minimal pairs.
Nonetheless, the vowel system here clearly has a
_low_ vowel as I've already explained. Since you
quote it, you can't remain stunned forever.
Do you not understand that /a/ is a low vowel? Its
length is immaterial to the facts.
> I do not know if it had /a/. I did not live then.
Then if that's your philosophy, you shouldn't be
speaking about IE at all and you should give up.
Try another forum then. This is silly. The fact
that we didn't live in that time does not bear on
what we know about language tendencies based on
a cornucopia of data from around the world!
The overwhelming, and so far absolute, fact is that
there is not *one* language without a low vowel.
Ergo, there is no scientific basis for reconstructing
a language without a low vowel and your whole position
is pseudoscience. We discourage pseudoscience on this
forum.
The rest of your post was full of emotional
irrelevancies and was purged from my response. I hope
that you strive to distinguish debate from emotional
quibbling. I wish to debate only. Keep feelings out
of this.
= gLeN
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