Lehmann's Syllabicity

[Leo A. Connolly]

Pat Ryan wrote:

> There are a number of IEists who do not subscribe to Lehmann's theory of
> "syllabicity",

I don't, of course, but I think we've through that already.

> which he originated to explain the unusual fact that most IE
> roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, which
> indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic ones.

> Unusual because in the great majority of languages around the world, varying
> root-vowels indicate lexical rather than morphological differences (Semitic
> sharing this peculiarity though perhaps not its parent PAA).

.......

> 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.

I have absolutely no evidence for what I'm about to say, so please: it
is mere speculation -- Gedankenlinguistik, wenn man's so nennen will.
It is the merest possibility and for that reason not worth flaming in a refutation.

1.  The proposed men- *man- *mon- opposition is somewhat weird in that
it has three non-high vowels: where are *min- and *mun-?

2.  This suggests that an original distinction was restructured when /e/
and /o/ were used to signal certain morphological categories.  They
could replace each other as required.  They could also be added to /i/
and /u/, producing the diphthongal ablaut series we know and love.

3.  It is well known that [a] is at least extremely rare in indisputably
IE roots, except in proximity to an "a-coloring laryngeal".  There has
recently been a discussion on this list proposing that non-laryngeal [a]
in Northern European forms means that these are not PIE in origin.  This
could mean either that (a) an earlier
*man- merged with something else (*men- and/or *mon-) in most
environments, or (b) that there was no earlier /man-/.  Since
four-vowel, a-less systems exist, neither possibility seeems better than
the other.

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

My speculations suggest that many such lexical differences were
precisely *not* maintanied.  They entail that the root types /men-/ and
/mon-/ (and /man-/, if it existed), merged as what we might call /men-/
or even /mVn-/.  And if the analysis was /wVn-/ (/V/ a non-high vowel
with features to be added by morphology), extension of the morphological
e:o ablaut to stems with original /i u/ would be readily understandable.

Two final comments:

1.  These speculations apply independent of whether PIE was a descendant
of Proto-Nostratic or even Proto-World.  They are triggered by internal
IED phenomena.

2.  Again, they are *SPECULATIONS*.  Please don't pounce too hard on
such a tempting target.

Regards
Leo Connolly