"centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes]

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

> [...]
> The accent pattern had certainly something to do with zero grade
> vs. normal grade, no doubt about that.  The influence of accent
> on e-grade vs. o-grade is less transparent [quite apart from the
> fact that it makes little sense phonetically].  There are of
> course obvious cases like the pattern [stressed] -e'(:)R vs.
> [unstressed] -o(:)R in the resonant stems.

> The e/o alternation in the thematic vowel is, one had to agree
> with Jens Rasmussen, caused by the quality of the following
> consonants (*e before voiceless/silence, *o before voiced).

Thanks! we are still a minority I believe, but a viable alternative does
not seem to have been proposed.

> The solution, I think, is to derive qualitative *e/*o-Ablaut from
> an earlier quantitative **a/**a:-Ablaut, with developments /a/ >
> /&/ > /e/ and /a:/ > /A:/ > /o(:)/.  Lengthening caused by
> ensuing voiced/lenis consonants is well-known (e.g. English).
> The transition from quantitative to qualitative distinction in
> vowels is also commonplace, in the case of /a/ with languages
> generally equally divided between long-backers (a: > o:) and
> short-backers (a > o).  Pre-PIE was a long-backer.  I don't have
> a good explanation for the poim'e:n ~ d'aimo:n phenomenon
> (stressed vowels resisted lengthening by following resonant?).
> Not all cases of e/o alternation seem to be due to secondary
> lengthening of **a, there were probably primary **a:'s as well.
> The backed *o: resulting from **a: generally lost its length
> (i.e. at a time when length was no longer phonemic), so it must
> predate "lengthened grade" and the laryngeal lengthenings.
> Brugmann's Law shows that the length was still allophonic in PII.

I don't get the part on Brugmann's Law. But stressed -e:'n vs. unstressed
'-o:n (and -e:'r vs. '-o:r and -e:s vs. '-o:s in parallel
fashion) indicates that the expected loss of the unstressed vowel of the
suffix (/-en-/, /-er-/, /-es-/) had not progressed further than to a stage
of weakening when the "nominative lengthening" set in: The nominative
marker (some variety of /s/) caused lengthening of the nearest preceding
vowel in the environment VC(C)_# Thereby, underlying /e/ appears as /e:/,
and the weakened counterpart is found, at the end of the day, to surface
as /o:/. Phonetically, this could perhaps be seen as something like the
French e muet which is indeed a weakened vowel and does exhibit a marked
rounding (at least in some varieties of the language). Supposing the
relevant prestage of PIE to have been comparable to this, one gets a "long
rounded schwa" from where the /o:/ of the PIE forms could well have
developed. It takes a rule saying the lengthened vowels were not deleted
by the working of the accent-governed ablaut, and in fact I see no
counterexamples. So, I agree, IE /o/ has a multitude of sources.

Cheers,

Jens