"syllabicity"

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Peter and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Peter &/or Graham <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 1999 3:16 PM

 <snip>

> Pat then offers material, which I suspect is from Collinge

Quite correct.

>, 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'"

Yes, I was trying implicitly (but should have been explicit) to indicate the
the question has not really been satisfactorily answered, and *so* cannot be
very decisive for the question of using consonantal 'laryngeals' to explain
these interesting long and short vowel phenomena.

> 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.

I bow to your better knowledge of Indic.

But, the question is: do you still believe that "Brugmann's Law" is a
serious argument for the consonantal nature of 'laryngeals' in IE?

If you agree with me that it *might* be of significance but not necessarily
so, wecan move on to another point if you want.

Pat

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