PIE e/o Ablaut

[Richard M. Alderson III]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2000, Patrick C. Ryan (proto-language at email.msn.com) wrote:

> Well, let us be a bit more precise. Old Indian [a]+[y] does *not* become /e/
> rather it becomes /e:/; O. I. [a] + [w] does *not* become /o/ rather it
> becomes /o:/. Careful notation distinguishes between long and short vowels
> although, in theory, I suppose there is no problem writing [o] so long as
> everyone knows that this indicates a long vowel /o:/.

Let's be careful with notations here:  [] indicate *phonetic* claims, while //
indicate *phonemic* claims.  It is  /ay/ that becomes /e:/, not [ay] or [ai];
mutatis mutandis, the same holds for the relationship between /aw/ and /o:/.

> I believe that in the earliest Indian, /e:/ must have, at least transitorily,
> have been pronounced like English /ey/ (Trager-Smith), and /o:/ like English
> /ow/ (T-S); and the early Indian grammarians clearly treat these sounds as
> diphthongal.

Indic *a = /a/ is phonetically [@], by which I mean a mid-central unrounded
vowel, not a reduced vowel.  This is often written in (American) phonology
texts with the inverted lowercase <v> symbol (cf. Laduslaw & Pullum, _Phonetic
Symbol Guide_, 2nd edition).  The sound of the collocations [@i] and [@u] are
familiar to those who have heard Canadian speakers from southern Ontario or
US speakers from the Tidewater region of Virginia, and their transition to
[e:] and [o:] is a simple matter of coloring of [@] and lowering of [i]/[u] by
the processes well-described by Patricia Stampe in papers published in the Ohio
State Working Papers in Linguistics in the mid-1970s.  There is no need for
them *ever* to have been [ei] and [ou]--though that is not ruled out.

> I think it is obvious that /e/ is an allophone of /a/ in an environment
> preceding /j/ and /o/ is an allophone of /a/ in an environment preceding /w/;

Impossible, if you truly mean the notation you are using.  I think you mean
that [e] and [o] are allophones of /a/, but by the time we are speaking of
Indic, those relationships simply do not exist in the sense you intend.

> Regardless of its acceptance, I find it very strange. Pre- means 'before'; if
> a form occurred *before* PIE came into existence, then it is non-PIE. If it
> is non-PIE, why not call it something else --- like Nostratic?

Because that makes claims about relationships which are not recoverable via the
method in question, internal reconstruction.  And the usual collocation is
"pre-IE" rather than "pre-PIE", though the latter is not really a solecism.  If
the results obtained by means of internal reconstruction can be correlated with
the results of Nostratic-level comparative reconstruction, we then have the
Nostratic equivalent of Kuryl~owicz's affirmation of the Saussurean _coe'ffi-
cients sonantiques_ in Indo-European, and Indo-Europeanists would have to then
reconsider very strongly their opposition to some version of Nostratic.

								Rich Alderson