Lehmann's Syllabicity

[proto-language]

Dear Jens and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" <jer at cphling.dk>
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 10:50 AM

> 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.

[JER]

> 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.

[PCR]

If we assume that a previous front-mid-back vocalism collapsed into a single
vocalism, which we might term syllabicity, and indicate by ^ as Lehmann does,
OR indicate as (pre-Ablaut) *e, bearing in mind that [e] may not have been its
phonetic realization; we end up, temporarily, with one lexico-semantic vowel.

Typologically, languages with one (if any) or two lexico-semantic vowels show
highly developed consonantism; frequently, consonants are present with no
glide, and palatal and velar glides.

Does this suggest to you, as it does to me, that pre-PIE *men, *man, *mon, went
through an early phase of *my^n, *m^n, *mw^n on their way to becoming *m^n,
eventually *me/on//*mN?

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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec
at ec hecc, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim
meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138)