From: dgkilday57
Message: 68491
Date: 2012-02-07
>Or even a pentad, if Osthoff was correct about invoking *i: ~ *i and *u: ~ *u to explain Greek <tri:bo:> against <etribe:n>, <glu:pho:> against <egluphe:n>, etc. ("Tiefstufe" in MU, I forget which volume).
> W dniu 2012-02-06 21:42, dgkilday57 pisze:
>
> > Marginal ablaut series are hard to accept. I prefer to look for a way to
> > justify the standard ablaut series, obscured by unusual phonology or
> > morphology. After all, that is what brought us laryngeals in the first
> > place. For diachronists, system should take precedence over surface
> > structure.
>
> There are other departures from the "classical" vowel gradation system
> that don't involve laryngeals: the Narten pattern (*e: ~ *e) and the *o
> ~ *e ablaut. They may form a system of their own. If *o ~ *e reflects
> something similar to Narten ablaut in pre-PIE (e.g. *o: ~ *o), *a: ~ *a
> would fit into this pattern rather nicely: a triad of pre-PIE tense
> vowels producing three types of acrostatic roots.
> The laryngeals are a bit like British English /r/, which also getsAll right, I accept the analogy. There are other sources of lengthening besides laryngeals.
> vocalised in some syllable positions causing compensatory lengthening or
> diphthongisation, colouring vowels and giving rise to new vowel
> phonemes. True, most instances of /a:/ in Received Pronunciation go back
> to /ar/, which however doesn't exclude other origin (like pre-fricative
> lengthening in <bath> or <fast>, pre-nasal developments in <dance>, etc.)
> > ... The example of Sanskrit <vájra->, Avestan <vazra-> is the 12th of the 14I wonder whether 'nose', goose', and 'salt' owe their *a: to this peculiar environment, preserved in the closed position of a monosyllabic root-noun. Perhaps Latin <falx> has a similar explanation.
> > cited by Lubotsky, "Laryngeals before mediae in Indo-Iranian", MSS
> > 40:133-8 (1981), in which a laryngeal appears to have vanished before an
> > inherited voiced unaspirated stop. In this paper L. does not distinguish
> > *h2 from *h4, and wherever he can determine the laryngeal, it is *h2 (or
> > *h4). His form for 'break' is thus *weh2g^-. His explanation is that a
> > laryngeal was lost in InIr before a voiced unaspirated stop plus another
> > consonant. Apparent exceptions, in his view, resulted from later
> > processes, primarily the thematization of originally athematic presents.
> > It is worth noting that *sweh2d- and *pleh2g- are two of L.'s other
> > examples. Since I now regard these roots as probably *weh4g^-, *sweh4d-,
> > and *pleh4g-, I intend to examine the remaining examples for evidence of
> > *h4.
>
> Of course I'm aware of "Lubotsky's Law", but have my reservations about
> it. What looks like *a: ~ *a ablaut is by no means restricted to roots
> ending in a media. For example, I find myself unable to accept the
> Leiden analyses of 'nose' or 'goose' as plausible real-world patterns
> and much prefer straightforward reconstructions like *(h)na:s-, *g^Ha:ns-.
> Are you sure that what you reconstruct as *eh4 is not a mere notationalNo, I am not sure, and it has occurred to me that I may be chasing a mirage, trying to shoehorn inherited *a and *a: into an expanded laryngeal system. What I need to do is collect more material. At the end of the day, hopefully one model will fit the data better: either one ablaut system with occasionally opaque phonology, or several ablaut systems of which one remained productive and transparent longer than the others.
> synonym of *a:?