From: Rick McCallister
Message: 59180
Date: 2008-06-10
>And then Americans <a> perfected the language by
> > >
> > Point for consideration (?): If /a/ is always of
> foreign origin
> > (since the original PIE didn't have /a/),
>
> Not always, cf eg. Latin schwa secundum.
>
> > why then didn't /a/ of foreign languages become
> borrowed as /e/ or /o/
> > or some other native sound? As an example, after
> English lost the
> > phonemes /y/ and /y:/, Old French /y:/ was
> borrowed as /eu/ (> /iu/ >
> > /ju:/)(as in <pure>) and Old French /y/ was
> borrowed as /u/ (as in
> > <punish>). So if Latin, being a descendant of
> PIE, didn't have any
> > /a/ inherited from PIE, why then did they adopt an
> entirely new
> > unfamiliar sound?
>
> Because /a/ is a more 'natural' sound than /ΓΌ/. Only
> few vowel
> inventories have the latter, almost all have the
> former; it is a
> naturally given extreme of the vowel triangle.
> English took a road
> comparable to that of PPIE: some /a/'s became /e/,
> some became /o/,
> and the empty space of /a/ was filled with foreign
> loans, eg. 'spa'.
>
>
> Torsten
>