Lehmann's Syllabicity

[proto-language]

Dear IEists:

There are a number of IEists who do not subscribe to Lehmann's theory of
"syllabicity", which he originated to explain the unusual fact that most IE
roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, which
indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic ones.

Unusual because in the great majority of languages around the world, varying
root-vowels indicate lexical rather than morphological differences (Semitic
sharing this peculiarity though perhaps not its parent PAA).

Without attempting to promote Lehmann's theory (at this time), I would first
like to learn what list-members consider to be the better alternatives for an
explanation of this phenomenon.

Let us assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that some unspecified
language earlier than but ancestral to IE had a structure in which differences
of vowel-quality signaled lexical differences: *men- /= *man- /= *mon-.
This is certainly justifiable on typological grounds.

First, I would like to know how list-members believe these lexical differences
were maintained in IE.

Pat
PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com
(501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA
WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/
and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html

"Veit ec at ec hecc, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío,
geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit,
hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138)