Re: PIE Word Formation (1)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Rob" <magwich78@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@> wrote:
> > ... *-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?

How can it be unreal if it is there?

> 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.

Well, it does have some special properties, e.g. it seems to have been
protected from loss. When unaccented, it may undergo a qualitative
shift (as in the oldest layers of derivartives) but doesn't ever
disappear completely. The stem-final position IS special and what
happens there may be regulated by rules that don't operate in other
contexts.

> ... 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-.

The temporal augment may be the same thing as the present-tense marker
*-i (this is something that has been discussed before). Anyway,
reduction in monosyllabic words can be blocked if it should yield
unsyllabifiable output. E.g. English lost its final schwas ca. 1300,
but not in grammatical words like <the> (the schwa has been restored
even in sandhi forms like <th'Omnipotent>, once common)

> 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.

There will be more about it in my series of talks.

Piotr