Re: *a/*a: ablaut

The 'easy' way often turns out to be very hard.

You must be the son of a banker - you like loans so well.

PPPIE *i, *a, *u for me; Ya, a, Wa for PPIE.

I would be willing to bet that *& is not wholly satisfying to Piotr either.


Patrick

----- Original Message -----
From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 11:42 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: *a/*a: ablaut


--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:
>
> Many of Kuhn's so-called *a-words have cognates in Sumerian that
> have <a>.
>
> Unless your proposing a Sumerian substrate in Europe, it is easier
> to assume that, with a word like *bhar-, the <a> is original
> (Sumerian par).
>

And the really, really easy way out is to assume the word is a loan in
both IE and Sumeria, so that the one I'm taking.
And BTW, I noticed an inordinate amount of IE roots in -a- among the
ones claimed to have cognates in Baltic Finnic, so I'll assume they
are loans in both language groups too.
That way, I can stick with a PPIE vowel inventory of three: i, a, u,
and don't have to, like Piotr, find a hole in that triangle to insert
an ancestor of PIE a.


Torsten