From: Rick McCallister
Message: 53103
Date: 2008-02-14
> 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
> >
> >
> >
> > Yahoo! Groups Links
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>