"syllabicity"

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Peter and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Peter &/or Graham <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 18, 1999 5:37 AM

> Pat said:

> >I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by
> >Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite.

> There is some evidence in Sanskrit that requires them to be a consonant:
> (a) the failure to lengthen IE /o/ in the 1st person singular perfect, while
> lengthening did take place in the 3rd:  1 sing: cakara < ke-ker-He, as
> opposed to 3 sing caka:ra < ke-ker-e.   This is usually explained by the
> presence of the now invisible consonant H in the 1 sing.

> [ Moderator's comment:
>   *ke-kor-H_2e vs. *ke-kor-e (Brugmann's Law).
>   --rma ]

I will attempt to address each of the phenomena you have kindly listed but,
in turn, would be more helpful, I think.

First, let me address the point raised by Rich. What he wrote suggests that
this phenomenon is explained by Brugmann's Law but is it not truer to say
that Brugmann proposed a vowel (<a{2}>) which manifested itself as <a:> in
Indo-Aryan in all open syllables and <a> in closed syllables but as <o> in
Armenian, Hellenic, Italic and Slavic --- and as <a> in Celtic, Germanic,
and Baltic?

With some emendations, Brugmann's Law "in the Kleinhans formulation
(limiting the phenomenon to positions before a R; later expanded to Lehmann
to 'before a semivowel'" lumbered along, half-heartedly endorsed, until
Kurylowicz proposed the "laryngeal" explanation in 1927.

By 1956, according to Szemerenyi, Kurylowicz had abandoned his emendation
(that of a 'laryngeal' preventing the syllable from being open), and this is
the formulation of the "Law" with which Rich is working:
Kleinhans-Lehmann-Kurylowicz version of Brugmann's Law. Oddly, Kurylowicz'
adherents maintained the position he had abandoned; and Gonda (1971) calls
the Law "long disputed and now refuted".

Frankly, when the Captain abandons ship, it is wise for the sailors to think
about the lifeboats also.

As some may know, Burrow (1975) came up with another explanation.

Now, we *all* are guilty from time to time of citing those authors who
support our ideas and rather cavalierly overlooking objections, and there do
seem to be a great number of them, posed not by amateurs like myself but by
trained IEists --- including the man who first proposed the 'laryngeal'
explanation.

In view of the unsettled status of consensus regarding the Law, I honestly
do not feel that it can be used effectively as a refutation of the idea
that, by IE times, 'laryngeals' had graduated into vowels.

Now, ideally, I would, of course, be able to offer the "correct" answer to
the variation of vowel length in the Sanskrit perfect but I do not claim to
be an IEist, and so many IEists have tried and failed to explain this to the
satisfaction of their peers that I would flatter myself overduly to think I
could propose the final answer to this intriguing problem.

I will offer only two thoughts in this connection:

1) I believe it is a mistake to reconstruct any *pre*-IE formant as simply V.

2) I suspect that the answer to the riddle is somewhat along the lines that
a 1st person HV and 3rd person HV led to the same phonological result in
Indo-Aryan, and that length, in the form of vrddhi differentiation, was
introduced to distinguish the two inflected forms, possibly in conjunction
with the stress-accent.

However, I certainly will not insist that this is the final answer.

Pat

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