Vowellessness... grunty?

Bryan Maloney <bjm10@...> wrote:
> > That's where the "no vowels in early PIE" idea comes from.  And it do=
esn't
> > mean that it was pronounced without vowels; if you listened to it it'=
d
sound
> > more or less like any other modern natlang.  It's that vowels weren't=
parts of
> > roots the way they are in most modern languages, at least at an early=
stage.
> =
> If the vowels weren't in the roots, then weren't they pronounced withou=
t
> vowels, or were the roots never actually pronounced (simply "implied")
> but always given some form of alteration (I hesitate to say "inflection=
",
> specifically) when actually used?
Um, think of it this way.  According to scholars such as Winifred Lehmann=
,
proto-Indo-European didn't have vowels, the same way that modern English
doesn't have tones.

You still pronounce each English word at some particular pitch, with some=

particular pitch contour, but a given pitch or pitch contour is not tied
distinctively to a word the way it is in Chinese.  You don't have to memo=
rize
the pitch or pitch contour as part of the word, as you would in Chinese.

Similarly, in very early PIE, you still had syllable nuclei ("vowels") in=
 the
words, but the quality and to some degree the location of those vowels we=
re
not tied to the roots.  They showed up in pronunciation in various ways (=
that
I don't yet understand, cause I don't own Lehmann's 1974 work, "The Phono=
logy
of Proto-Indo-European" (can anybody help me here?)), but they weren't ti=
ed to
the word.

Ed


____________________________________________________________________
Get free e-mail and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=3D=
1