"syllabicity"

[Peter &/or Graham]

Sanskrit :  1 sing: cakara as >> opposed to 3 sing caka:ra

>> [ Moderator's comment:
>>   *ke-kor-H_2e vs. *ke-kor-e (Brugmann's Law).
>>   --rma ]


[Thanks for the correction, Rich - it was a silly mistake of mine.]

Pat then offers material, which I suspect is from Collinge, offering
criticisms of Bruggmann's Law, which I accept as valid (though not
decisive).  He then goes on:

>As some may know, Burrow (1975) came up with another explanation.

And as you know, Pat, Burrow's explanation doesn't work either.   It appears
to work because as Collinge puts it (page 18 in my edition) "Burrow allows
analogies of his own choosing, but not of others'"

Pat then sugggests:
>I suspect that the answer to the riddle is somewhat along the lines that
>a 1st person HV and 3rd person HV led to the same phonological result in
>Indo-Aryan, and that length, in the form of vrddhi differentiation, was
>introduced to distinguish the two inflected forms, possibly in conjunction
>with the stress-accent.

In fact the process seems to have been the other way:   Vedic (I believe)
distinguishes 1 sing and 3 sing fairly regularly, but in Classical Sanskrit
the 1 sing could take vrddhi grade just like the 3 sing., so analogy (or
whatever) worked to make the two forms identical, rather than to
disambiguate them.

Peter