Torsten, who is innately modest, states:
>BTW, my innate modesty forbids me to direct your attention to the
>above posting, re: e-o-nothing.
Oh, did I miss your posting? Why didn't you say so before, man!
>Bomhard often has IE e/o/nothing cooresponding to AA a/schwa. But
>already Møller (or was it Cuny) proposed a/schwa for IE, as a more
>consistent system (the e/o/nothing ablaut is based on Greek alone).
See, here is what troubles me - the direct comparison of such things as ablaut between IE
and AA, as if 15,000 years hadn't changed the two languages at all. I'm sorry but 15,000
years is a very long time and two languages seperated by this amount of time would have
very little in common at all. To be honest, I'm not caught up on my Møller and so I can't
be sure if my views are in line at all with his proposals. However, while I think *e/*o ablaut
comes from an earlier *&/*a ablaut (& = schwa) within IndoTyrrhenian, I can't see how
the ablaut seen in IE and that of Semitic can possibly be related. They have different functions
and operate differently.
The alternation of these phonemes is hardly bizarre and occurs countless times in any language> One thing that strikes me is the abundance of roots differing by
> d/l/r/n, as in [...]
- gLeN