"centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes]

[Stanley Friesen]

At 08:11 PM 2/1/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
>Stanley Friesen <sarima at friesen.net> wrote:

>>Why is it necessary to go this way?  IMHO, there are sufficient instances
>>of 'i' and 'u' in PIE the do *not* alternate with ablaut variants such as
>>'eu' and 'ei' to suggest the inheritance of those vowels from the Pre-PIE
>>stage, at least in some environments.

>I'm not so sure.  There are certainly "loose" *i's and *u's among
>the pronouns (e.g. *tu/*tu:), in affixes like *-i (dat/loc,
>"present tense"), but IMHO anomalously few among common
>nouns/adjectives and verbs.  For instance, I don't think
>Benveniste's root-theory allows *i and *u in the V position (or
>does it?).  It would be nice to have statistics.

I think Benveniste's root-theory is somewhat artificial.  I doubt the
speakers actually thought of things that way.   I admit there are not
*many* roots in 'i' and 'u', but there are *some* roots that cannot be
clearly reconstructed as having had an 'e' or 'o'.

>Surely the existence of *kw, *k^ etc. suggests that some high
>vowels were lost, passing their front- or backness to the
>adjacent consonants (is there another explanation?).  Coupled
>with the comparative rarity of non-zero grade *i and *u, I think
>it's clear that *something* happened to the high vowels at some
>stage of Pre-PIE.

I agree that some loss is likely.  I was question *total* loss.  At least
that was how I interpreted your original model, since you discussed loss or
change to e/o in all environments.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com