Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE

[Stanley Friesen]

At 02:23 PM 5/14/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:

>[PCR]
>Surely this needs a rethink. This might work if CVC-roots had only ONE
>root-extension but your scenario means that an IE-speaker would have to
>abstract CVC from a CVCC root in order to add other root-extensions.
>Frankly, I don't think so.

I am not quite sure what you are getting at here.  Why do you keep going
back to root-extensions when I do not ever mention them?

I see no reason to postulate an *active* process of root extension in PIE -
or at least not a common process of that sort.  Most variant root
extensions could either be inherited from the pre-PIE stage (from *older*
suffixes), or be due to individual development in the various separate
languages.  (For instance variations of the -k/-g sort look to me like
inter-dialect borrowings from *after* the breakup of the proto-language).

For those CVC roots that only occur with various extensions, I am not even
sure there is any evidence that the PIE speakers were aware of them as
such.  I would tend to treat them as effectively separate roots unless
there is some evidence of PIE phase awareness of the base.  But either way,
the extensions by themselves are sufficient to establish differentiation,
so no further means is necessary. A CVC root with extensions is no longer
truly homophonous with another such root with different extensions.

The sorts of suffixes I see as being productive in PIE were the *stem*
formatives and verbal suffixes of the *-ske- sort, rather than the extensions.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net