Re: [tied] Re: Ie. *laywos/leh2iwos (was: ka and k^a)

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 15:19:59 +0000, Rob
<magwich78@...> wrote:

>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
>wrote:
>> glen gordon wrote:
>>
>> > This is why we should alleviate this phone[m/t]ic
>> > confusion by writing *h2e, not *h2a. Afterall, if the
>> > apophony is patterned the same way as *pod-/*ped-,
>> > then clearly the phoneme is *e in genitive _*h2ep-ós_.
>> > We can plainly see that if *e is ever next to the
>> > "marked" class (*h2, *q, *G, *GH) that we should
>> > pronounce it as /A/ anyways. And who says that
>> > coloured *e is the same vowel as non-coloured *a?
>> > I don't. Food for thought.
>>
>> One should be careful with adverbs like "ever". The colouring by
>> the *K series was inconsistent. We have well-attested roots like *s)
>> ker-, *sek- or *legH-, which don't show any a-colouring. It may
>> have been a capricious, incomplete sound change, like the lowering
>> of Early Modern English /u/, which took place in <butter> but not
>> in <butcher>.
>
>Are you sure that that English sound change was incomplete? If so,
>please explain.

<butter> vs. <butcher> is clear enough.

ME [U] was unrounded to [V] starting in the 16th and 17th.
cc. The change was generally blocked by an initial labial
(b-, p-, f-, w-, early on also by m-), especially when
followed by /l/ or /s^/ (sometimes also /m/, /t/, /d/).
Examples would be: bull, bullet, pull, pulpit, Fulham, wolf,
wool, bush, bushel, push, woman, pudding, wood, put,
butcher. In "cushion", /s^/ alone seems to be responsible.
"Cuckoo" is onomatopeic.

But there are also examples where we have /V/ despite P..L
(pulp, pulse, bulk, bulb [note that all the examples have
-lC]) or P..T (but, butter, putt).


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...