PIE e/o Ablaut

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

>> On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Pat Ryan (proto-language at email.msn.com) wrote:

>>> I am under the impression that a consistent explanation ofIE /o/ has been
>>> formulated: namely, that /e'/ becomes /o/ when the stress-accent is
>>> transferred to another syllable.

> [Rich Alderson:]

>> The *pitch* accent, not the *stress* accent, at least if you are having
>> recourse to Lehmann's theory of the vowel system.

> [Pat Ryan:]

> Correction accepted. Although, as we all know, the relationship of stress-
> and tone-accents is gnarled.

I don't think the facts are anywhere near this way: In the perfect, the
/o/ is accented, its unaccented variant being zero; the same goes for the
intensive and the reduplicated aorist; and if the reduplicated present has
o-vocalism (always or sometimes), for that as well (when applicable). The
unaccented variant of /e/ is also zero, cf. Gk. ane'ra, andro's (acc.
*H2ne'r-m, gen. *H2nr-o's); a present like *H1e's-ti, 3pl *H1s-e'nti; an
optative like *H1s-ie'H1-t, 1pl *H1s-iH1-me'; or paradigmatic pieces like
*'-iH2, gen. *-ye'H2-s; acc. *'-im, gen. *-e'y-s; *'-um, gen. *-e'w-s;
ntr. *-mn, gen. *-me'n-s; aor. *dhe'H1-t, ppp *dh at 1-to'-s; 'sun' is
*se'H2-wl, gen. *sH2-ue'n-s. In all of this, and many, many other
examples, accented /e/ alternates with zero. However, lengthened /e:/ does
alternate with unaccented /o:/: nom.sg. *p at 2-te:'r as opposed to
*swe'-so:r; Gk. lime:'n as opposed to a'kmo:n; end-stressed s-stem
eugene:'s as opposed to root-stressed s-stem he'o:s /*a'uho:s/. Thus, if
the compounded form of Gk. pate:'r is as in eupa'to:r, the o-timbre is not
by virtue of the stem's being deaccented, but by its being simply
unaccented (for whatever reason), for words that never changed their
accent also show /o/ in case they have root-accent. The route to this /o:/
must go via a reduction of the underlying /e/ prior to the lengthening
induced by the nominative marker //-s//, i.e. the /-o:-/ is nothing but
the lengthened variant of reduced /-e-/. In stems with underlying long
vocalism, lengthening of /-e:-/ yielded /-o:-/, thus *pe:d- => nom.
*po:'d-s; likewise *de:m- => *do:'m-s (exact form of nom.sg. insecure, but
acc. can only be *do:'m); I take this to indicate that the final part of
the superlong vowel was unaccented and so developed o-timbre, and the
/-o:(:)-/ is the product of contraction.

   - There are special cases that demand special rules, thus the thematic
vowel (stem-final vowel of all kinds of stems) which is not reduced by the
accent, but alternates e/o depending on the phonetic nature of what
follows (the alternation is best preserved in pronouns and verbs, but
plainly applied originally also to nouns), actually in a very simple way:
/e/ is the form before voiceless segments and zero, while /o/ is the form
before old voiced segments, including the little surprise (or flaw, if you
look at it with a hostile mind) that the nominative *-s acts like a voiced
segment and produces *-o-s; thus, the nom. *-s is different from the *-s
of the 2sg of the verb which has *-e-s; note that the two also differ in
the detail that the 2sg marker does not cause lengthening and so must have
been originally phonetically different from the nom. morpheme.

   - Another special case is the "o-infix" I claim to have found in the
causative and in thematic derivatives like Gk. tome:', po'rne:. To my very
great surprise these forms only became amenable to normal algebra if the
/-o-/ segment was derived from an earlier consonantal added morpheme, i.e.
an infixed sonant which later, after the working of ablaut proper,
developed into /o/ (or was lost, the two results being in phonetic
complementary distribution). It is only in such forms that we find
"laryngeal loss in words with o-grade", often called Saussure's rule,
because Saussure collected a few examples of wanting laryngeal reflex and
found their common salient feature to be "o-grade". Saussure did not offer
any explanation of the strange fact, and as long as the o is taken to be a
phenotype of the old _vowel_, there can be none; however, if the o is seen
as an old consonant, the solution is obvious: laryngeals were lost where
there were many clustering consonants, and retained where there were
fewer. We also understand that the _unaccented_ -o- of, say, caus.
*mon-e'ye-ti 'causes to think' was not lost: it was a consonant when the
ablaut worked.

   These facts are all well known - or based on the analysis of types of
examples that have been in the focus of attention for a century. Their
actual testimony is _very_ far from being "e goes to o when the accent is
shifted away from it". When will you ever learn?

Jens