Re: The Monovocalic PIE Myth (was Germans have no /w/, ...)

This is perhapsa it off-subject, but it seems fitting.
  One interest of mine is how quickly human-language
phonemes began to differentiate. It seems reasonable
to me that the earliest languages would have had
sparse inventories due to physiological constraints
(such as lack of control over breath, incompletely
developed larynx, etc.) and psycho-neurological
inability to distinguish similar sounds. But oe would
think that once our language abilitiesemerged, we
would have tended toward the route of !Xoo
(considering how we constantly draw infinitely subtle
distinctions throughout history), yet languages like
Rotokas are alive and well today. It just seems
terribly difficult to make true cross-linguistic
genralizations.
              Travis
P. S. None of the above really has a point, butI feel
better now.
--- Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 02:28:11 -0700,
> Emily Zilch <emily0@...> wrote:
>
> > [...]
> >
> > Incidentally, issue of marking resonants as
> syllabic is particularly
> > cogent when dealing with certain languages of New
> Guinea whose surface
> > representations show, say, typical five- to
> seven-vowel systems but
> > whose underlying phonemes require only ONE vowel
> plus vocalic forms of,
> > say, [ y ] & [ w ].
>
> Why not call those phonemes /i/ and /u/ and say that
> they have
> non-syllabic as well as syllabic variants?
>
> >       For someone who struggled to understand the
> > theoretical system of PIE's earlier stages, it
> helped a LOT to see such
> > systems in RL (real life).
> >
> > Nota bene: for those who are not familiar,
> theories of earliest PIE
> > periods recommend a single vowel, usually marked
> as [ e ], with a
> > similar system of multiple surface realisations
> depending on stress
> > (i.e. later phonemicised into a two- or
> three-vowel system of [ e ] [ o
> > ] ~ [ e ] [ o ] [ a ], depending on your theory)
> and later consonantal
> > loss (i.e. vowel insertion &/or lengthening
> phonemicised due to loss of
> > the "laryngeals" or [ H_1-3 ]), plus the
> syllabification of resonants.
> > Some of this has only become evident in the most
> recent work on *PIE of
> > the stage preceding the Hittite split and others
> are just plain theory,
> > but now I can at least *believe* it is possible
> since it demonstrably
> > happens in living (RL, no offense meant o fellow
> conlangers) languages.
>
> I don't think that PIE had only one vowel phoneme at
> any stage of
> its history.  At the time of the breakup, it had the
> usual five vowels
> /a e i o u/ plus syllabic allophones of /m n l r/.
> And I think that
> pre-ablaut pre-PIE had three vowels /a i u/ of equal
> standing,
> which then all took part in ablaut.  There was a
> pitch accent
> on the penultimate syllable, and a strong and a weak
> grade
> of each vowel, of which the strong grade occured
> under the accent
> and the weak grade elsewhere.
>
> The development (according to my theory) was thus:
>
> strong grade
>
>  *á > *e
>  *í > *ei
>  *ú > *ou > *eu
>
> weak grade
>
>  *a > *@ > *o/0
>  *i > *i
>  *u > *u
>
> I.e., *i and *u did not change in weak grade and
> diphthongized
> in strong grade.  The strong-grade *á became *e and
> weak-grade *a
> was weakened to schwa, which deleted in contexts
> where the resulting
> consonant cluster was acceptable or a nearby
> sonorant could double
> as syllable nucleus.  This is the zero grade of the
> traditional
> ablaut theory.  Where deletion of schwa would have
> resulted in
> an inadmissible consonant cluster, it remained in
> place and later
> became *o, which was then paradigmatized as a
> separate o-grade.
>
> Pre-ablaut pre-PIE might have had the diphthongs *ai
> and *au
> in addition to *a, *i and *u.  Their strong grades
> would have
> merged with the strong grades of *i and *u, while
> the weak
> grades would have been *@i > *i and *@u > *u, thus
> the same as
> the weak grade of *i and *u.  Hence, the diphthongs
> merged with
> the high vowels in both grades.  How to tell whether
> the pre-ablaut
> form had *i or *ai (or, for that matter, *u or *au)?
>  Phonotactics.
> *CeiC is from *CiC, while *Cei is from *Cai.
>
> Well, that's what I think about it.  Comments
> welcome.
>
> Greetings,
>
> Jörg.


	
		
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