[gothic-l] problems with evolution of Gothic vowel system

[Manuel Gutierrez Algaba]

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On Fri, 1 Sep 2000 jdm314 at aol.com wrote:
> example, is the Sanskrit word as'va somehow closer to proto-indo-european
> *ek'wos than, say, Latin equus?

Sanskrit tends to put a's all over the place.
> German was more conservative but even so it has too much vowels,
>
> they have three "e" while Spanish/Latin has only one. >>
>
> Let's see, do you mean eh, e, and ae? I should mention that Latin technically
> has TWO e's, namely the long and the short.

The short Latin e is not so significative as the short German e.
And probably, Latin short e was a matter of aesthetics. We, Spaniards,
have only one foneme (e) but the three sounds (long, short and open)
for that e, like in "preferemente". The question is that is not
significative for us! We interpolate. For some reason, Germanic
people started to pronounce more tightly and get different fonemes
for the same letter (grapheme) : e

>
> herdijaz is closer to hrdijaz that hairdeis. Consider vocalic
>
> as that the ratio vowel/consonants tends to get higher. >>
>
> Are you sure? Keep in mind that the soudn represented by <ai> in Gothic is
> not the same as, say, the sound represented by <ai> in Spanish!

Well, are you using quasi-phonetic notation? Spanish is quasi-phonetic.
It'd be nuts to write hairdeis following English rules.

>
> Er, can someone else take this one? I mean explaining how -ijaz > -eis. I
> remember that it pertains to syllable weight, but I can never get all the
> details just right, and I don't feel like looking it up right now.
>     Note, btw, that the -jaz suffix would become just an umlaut in Modern

An ez, with long e. Or a broken diphtongue, -j/az

> German, so I'm not sure if it HAS dissapeared entirely. True, you can't just

> everything upside down (or so I'm told), but I'm not sure what you mean about
> "hard" r's. Do you mean the r in the Spanish word perro? That DOES seem to be

The r in perro is /rr/, a very strong r. The r in "cara" is still
harder than the French one, while softer than the two r's in perro.

>     Proto-Indo-European had only one sibilant... only one fricative really,
> and that was s...

Ok, that's not right, I can't agree. No derived Indo-european
language has such a simple scheme. For such strong assert you
need a good couple of books to convince me.

> THOSE were. Perhaps you're thinking of Indo-Iranian?

Indo-Iranian = Indo-arian = Indo-european

If you don't know it, Iranian resembles a lot Germanic languages,
even with the lots of arab words it currently has.


Regards/Saludos
Manolo
www.ctv.es/USERS/irmina    /TeEncontreX.html   /texpython.htm
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