Danny Wier:

>I'm not alone on the list am I? Hello?
>[...]
>I've been scouring Bomhard's book like mad lately.

Oh joy! There ARE people still on the list afterall! Excellent,
then there will be one more person to talk with about
Bomhard's work. Joy of joys.

>The front and back vowels I expected. But notice that the central pair (@
>~ a) can correspond to the ablaut pair e ~ o in IE (if not a which occurs
>with laryngeals, or @).

I disagree harshly with this view. As far as I'm concerned, the
ablaut patterns seen in Indo-European are unique to IndoTyrrhenian
and their developments can be fully explained stage by stage. IE
ablaut cannot be seriously related to patterns found amongst
remotely related languages like Kartvelian or AA. (You may note
that Bomhard doesn't even go into great detail about how these
patterns relate in order to substantiate his assumption of ablaut
in Nostratic.)

Ablaut is not an uncommon feature and can arise independantly, especially
amongst languages seperated by some 15,000 years.
(And the vowel harmony of Altaic is also largely unrelated to
IndoTyrrhenian ablaut, since it developed in a completely
different way without the help of accent.)

>By the way, Afro-Asiatic merged the high vowels with @ and
>the low vowels with a, so a @ ~ a ablaut pair may exist for AA.

Yes, as long as you go with the Diakonoff model of the AA vowel
system, although there are others to keep in mind.

>So I'm asking if the stress shifts that produce IE ablaut didn't come from
>an earlier source found in IE, AA, and possible Kartvelian. And should I
>have posted this on [tied] instead?

Since no one is speaking on this list after the "PR incident",
any subject would be a boost to this list :)

My view is that the seemingly patternless accent of IE was caused
by the loss of all final vowels during a stage when there was
accent placed regularly on the penultimate syllable (second-to-last
syllable). The underlying penultimate accentuation of IE inflexion
(particularly active secondary terminations for athematic verbs
like *es- and athematic declensions like *po:t/pedos "foot/of
the foot") becomes very obvious when one properly adds the
original final vowels:

*po:t < *p�t:e (se) "(the) foot"
*ped-os < *pet:�-se "of the feet"
(note final vowel on the genitive ending)

Thus, IE words with accent on final syllable are indicative of
a lost final vowel. I've dated this change of penultimate to
mobile accent to 5500-5000 BCE in the latter half of the Mid IE
stage. However, the penultimate accent itself must have
developed between 7000 and 5500 BCE, after IE fully seperated
from IndoTyrrhenian. Etruscan and Lemnian show the original accent
- fixed on the initial syllable (as is also seen in Uralic).

I have no thoughts on Nostratic accent although I suspect that it
may not have been fixed as it clearly is in Eurasiatic languages
(that is, including Sumerian and Dravidian).


- gLeN

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