Re: *a/*a: ablaut

You have completely misunderstood the *& we are talking about.

It is not *& as a unstressed allophone of a long vowel.


Patrick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick McCallister" <gabaroo6958@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 12:18 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] *a/*a: ablaut


> I remember people talking about /a/ vs/ /&/ about 10
> years ago on the old IE list. So it's been around.
>
> --- Patrick Ryan <proto-language@...> wrote:
>
> > 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
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
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