Re: *a/*a: ablaut

Is this pre-PIE fourth vowel [&] generally accepted now in PIEist circles?


Patrick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 5:31 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] *a/*a: ablaut


> Patrick Ryan pisze:
>
> > If you will forgive me, Piotr, that is not what I thought you said
> > before.
> >
> > I understood: there are two *a's: some became *a, others *a:.
> >
> > And now you wish to _add_ a new vowel to the PIE inventory?
> >
> > Wow!
>
> There must have been some misunderstanding. I said "true" *a: and *a
> (not from coloured *e) reflected the same pre-PIE phoneme. The vowel
> inventory of pre-PIE would have had four members: *i, *u, *a plus a mid
> vowel. The quality of the fourth vowel is difficult to determine. It
> could have been a system like that of Yupik or Proto-Salishan (*i, *u,
> *&, *a), or like that of, say, Etruscan, Shasta and the short-vowel
> subsystem of Proto-Germanic (*i, *u, *e, *a); the former is more
> symmetrical, the latter probably more common cross-linguistically.
>
> Inventories with just one mid vowel are generally regarded as defective
> and diachronically unstable, so little wonder that PIE developed a more
> stable five-term system (*i, *u, *e, *o, *a). It's also possible, though
> hard to demonstrate, that "true" (fundamental) *o existed in pre-PIE
> after all, in which case the five-wowel system would be very old, but
> the original distribution of vowel phonemes was disturbed and obscured
> by the conditional mergers of various allophones of *e with *o and *a
> and the rise of "classical" ablaut, which came to dominate PIE
> morphophonology.
>
> Piotr
>
>
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