--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> On 2006-04-03 16:34, Rob wrote:
>
> > Regrettably, this point is where my disagreement begins. To begin
> > with, I consider the term "thematic" to be misleading here. From
> > the evidence I've seen, it does not appear that the "thematic
> > vowel" had its origin as such. Rather, I trace its origin to the
> > (animate) genitive ending, *-ós.
>
> Was it any different from the inanimate genitive? And how and why
> was the vowel of the genitive ending reanalysed as a stem-final
> element?
I put the word "animate" in parentheses because I'm not yet sure about
the veracity of reconstructed forms like *nméns 'name (gen. sg.)'. If
such forms are secure, then it would appear that they continue an
earlier genitive in *-s which, in animate nouns, became the sigmatic
nominative. The i-stem and u-stem genitive forms *-éis and
*-éus/*-óus, respectively, could have come from the same process.
> > Furthermore, while *o does indeed appear to be
> > a conditioned variant of *e (or, more accurately, they are both
> > conditioned variants of a single earlier vowel, which I mark as
> > *a), the overwhelming pattern is *e when stressed and *o (or zero)
> > when unstressed. Thus, any instance of unstressed *e or stressed
> > *o would seem to need some other explanation. As a result, it
> > does not follow to me that the vocative ending *-e (and perhaps
> > also the instrumental ending *-eh) is a conditioned variant of the
> > "thematic vowel" (otherwise *o).
>
> This looks to me like an artificial difficulty. The rule determining
> the quality of the thematic vowel has been partly obscured by
> analogical levellings, but there are sufficient traces of the
> original state of affairs, especially in the verb system: *-o-m,
> *-o-mes, *-o-nt but *-e-s, *-e-t, *-e-te and *-e (in the
> imperative).
Yes, I understand the apparent pattern here. The question is, is it a
real pattern or not? As I have mentioned before, the rules proposed
for the thematic vowel conveniently seem to operate only on the
thematic vowel, which otherwise is indistinguishable from other
instances of IE's ablauting vowel. On the other hand, I have noticed
a tendency for this vowel to become rounded (and subsequently backed)
next to a coda labial resonant or labiovelar.
The overwhelming pattern of ablaut that we seem to see, in the oldest
IE forms, is that of quantitative ablaut. That is, we see stressed *e
and unstressed zero. As a result, this process gave rise to the
syllabic resonants, which therefore must have always been unstressed
to begin with. It also means that any instances of unstressed *e that
we see must have been *late* phenomena -- i.e. they must have been
developed after quantitative ablaut ceased to be productive. Two good
examples here are the enclitic particle *-kWe "and", and the so-called
"temporal augment", *e-.
However, IE phonotactics, while they seem to have been rather liberal,
could not have allowed complete vocalic reduction in any arbitrary
sequence of unstressed syllables. An important question, to which I
don't think the answer has been completely found yet, is under what
conditions was vowel reduction prevented in early or pre-IE.
- Rob