PIE e/o Ablaut

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Miguel and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" <mcv at wxs.nl>
Sent: Saturday, March 04, 2000 1:24 PM

> "Patrick C. Ryan" <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote:

>> From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" <mcv at wxs.nl>

<snip>

[MCV]
> That is often said, but it needs to be elaborated for it to make
> sense.  Did (Pre-)PIE have simultaneous stress accent and tonal
> accent, or did it switch from one to the other in the course of
> its development?  If it switched from stress accent to pitch
> accent (as suggested by zero grade everywhere and Vedic-Greek
> accentuation), how did the unstressed vowels that were to become
> o's by pitch accent survive the reduction caused by stress
> accent? Etcetera.

[PR]
This is, of course, a crucial question.

At a time long ago, in an Urheimat far away . . .

When PIE had only one vowel, /a/ . . .

One possibility might be that, just prior to the transition from
stress-accent (which was *free*) to tonal accent, the syllable which would
later display /o/ was stress-accented; in other words, at that point was
/a'/.

The stress-accented syllable with /a'/  (which might have induced to become
/a:'/), then became /a(:)*/, with the asterisk indicating a high-tonal
accent, when tonal accent supplanted stress-accent.

Sanskrit reflects this stage.

Subsequently, the tonal accent was moved to the root syllable, and *fixed*,
producing Ca*-Ca(:)., with . indicating a low tone.

Later yet, high tones produced syllables with /e*/, low tones produced
syllables with /o(:)./.

Finally, stress-accent was re-introduced, and the syllable with high-tone
/e*/ became /e'/ while the syllable with low-tone /o(:)./ became simply
/o(:)/.

<snip>

>> [MCVp]

>>> 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.

[PR]

So are you saying there was a time when PIE had two phonemic vowels: /a/ and
/a:/?

And, if so, what are some roots that had phonemic /a:/ at this stage?

>> [PRp]
>> But why would they (primary /*a:/s) not have become /*o:/? And what would
>> the source of primary /*a:/ have been? I know of no evidence from PIE
>> indicating that lengthened grade was a morphological device.

[MCV]
> Primary (etymological, non-apophonic) **a:'s gave *o (sometimes
> <a:> in Indo-Iranian by Brugmann's Law) just like secondarily
> lengthened **a's.  This is the origin of the PIE acrostatic
> paradigms (I again agree with Jens), as opposed to the "regular"
> proterodynamic (root/extension-accented) and hysterodynamic
> (extension/suffix-accented) models without an original long vowel
> in the root.

> Lengthened grade was certainly a morphological device in PIE
> (vrddhi).  JER has an alternative explanation, but I would
> distinguish between cases of "old vrddhi", where the **a was
> lengthened to **a: and appears as PIE *o (e.g. the
> causative-iteratives in CoC-'ei-e-), and "younger vrddhi" where
> the **a first developed to *e and was subsequently lengthened to
> *e:.

[PR]

And could you describe the morphological function of lengthened grade in
PIE?

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
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