Lehmann's Syllabicity

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, proto-language [i.e., Pat Ryan - JER] wrote:

> [...]
> Let us assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that some unspecified
> language earlier than but ancestral to IE had a structure in which
> differences of vowel-quality signaled lexical differences: *men- /= *man- /=
> *mon-.  This is certainly justifiable on typological grounds.

> First, I would like to know how list-members believe these lexical
> differences were maintained in IE.

In Indo-Iranian where this actually happened, the various sources just
merged. I see no objection to the view that the widely monotonous vocalism
of PIE has passed through a comparable collapse. The actual event of
merger apparently antedates the protolanguage quite a bit, for there has
been at least time to create - or borrow and retain - words with other
vocalisms than /e/. It would also be reasonable to suppose that the many
vocalic alternations (ablaut "grades") depart from an already-collapsed
unitary /e/ than from a retained diversity of vowel timbres that just
ended up parallel even after the mergers. This pushes unitary /e/ back
into pre-ablaut pre-PIE and leaves ample time for later developments that
blurr the picture a bit. One may also note that the IE ablaut types can
even be detected on the sole basis of a single IE language as, say, Greek
which is certainly not contemporaneous with the protolanguage.

Jens