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

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Stanley and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2000 7:03 AM

> At 10:11 AM 2/8/00 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

>> Compare the number of Ce-/Co-roots (e.g. in Pokorny) with the
>> number of Ci-/Cu-roots.  I guesstimate the difference is a factor
>> 10 or so.

<SF wrote>
> Certainly.  But in my book, even a handful of such roots is enough to
> establish i and u as PIE vowel phonemes.

<PR>
What I believe I have found is that IE /i/ and /u/ correspond to Semitic /y/
and /w/ whenever a cognate can be established (seems likely).

>From this, I provisionally conclude that IE went through a stage in which it
had one vowel (= Lehmann's SYLLABICITY), which we designate now as /e/,
which later developed a conditioned variant /o/.

Of course, this means that /a(:)/ was also not an independent part of the
vowel system but only could occur in conjunction with a 'laryngeal'; e.g. IE
*(H[2])abh-ro-, 'strong, powerful', should, I believe, be compared to Arabic
Habba, 'love'.

I believe the process through which this happened is roughly that Nostratic,
which had phonemic /e,a,o/ came into areal contact which Caucasian languages
that favored extreme vowel reduction, and transference of vocalic
differences to glides: CE -> Cya; CO -> Cwa, which were subsequently lost
when IE began utilizing root extensions for semantic differentiation.

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek,
at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)