Re: Horses' Asses and the Indo-European Homeland

On 2008-09-27 01:27, david_russell_ watson wrote:

> Did these resulting /ja/ and /jo/ begin their existence
> as diphthongs, or were they from their start a sequence
> of phonemes two?

The former, it seems. Such developments are relatively common. Late
Middle English had the arguably phonemic falling dipthongs /eu/ and /iu/
(the latter not only from native sources but also as a substitute for
French /y/). In (most of) Modern English, they first merged as /iu/ and
then the peak of prominence shifted to the second element, giving /ju:/,
in which the glide was reanalysed as a separate phonemic segment (which
is why we now have both <a yew> and <a ewe> rather than *<an ewe>).

Piotr

I think I remember that Trask spoke of  /y, ü/ > /yu/ in his paragraph on "unpacking"