"syllabicity"

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Tue, 11 May 1999, Rich Alderson wrote:

[snip]

>Sanskrit was never monovocalic, phonologically speaking.  There is more than
>one source, for example, of [e:]--see, for example, _dive dive_ "from day to
>day", where the first _dive_ is the expected sandhi variant of the ablative
>_divas_ "from (a) day".  Thus, again, your analysis fails to explain the
>facts.

But even so, the preform *divaz-dyvai, supposing it is correct (and it is
a _very_ good idea), may be analyzed as /dyvas-dyvay/ and so makes do with
only one phoneme that is always syllabic. Would you not agree that the
vowel was /a/ at one time - and still is synchronically in one stage of
abstraction - in both cases?

Jens