Re: PIE Word Formation (1)

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

> > 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?

That's my point. Your question seems to beg another question -- is
the pattern 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.

Are you saying that the stem-final position (wherever that may be) is
universally special? That its specialness applies
cross-linguistically? I don't mean to sound incredulous here -- I
would just like some further clarification.

> > ... 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)

In pronouncing "the Omnipotent" myself, I find that it is very
difficult to discern the schwa in the article from the initial vowel
from the noun. The phrase tends to be realized as [DA:m.nI'.p@.4n=?],
using X-SAMPA notation -- the emphasis here is on the phonetically
lengthened first vowel. However, while I agree with you that
monosyllabic words resist desyllabic reduction, that was not the point
I was making. The point was more about instances of unstressed *e in
*multisyllabic* words -- e.g. the vocative singular ending *-e, the
verbal "thematic vowel", etc.

> > 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.

Sounds good. :)

- Rob