Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE

[Stanley Friesen]

At 06:36 PM 3/15/01 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote:

>Any word in which *i or *u can be reconstructed.  That they may alternate in
>morphophonological rules with *y and *w is irrelevant to their phonemic
>status, though the consonantal forms may have originated in fortitions of
>originally vocalic segments.  (For the concept of fortition processes, see P.
>Donegan's Ohio State dissertation, still available I believe as a working
>paper from the linguistics department there.)

I am not sure if this is what you mean here, but I find I have a tendency
in my speech to excrete a consonantal segment between two vowels in
different syllables.  Thus, starting with a sequence like 'u' + 'e' I tend
to produce the sequence 'uwe', and for sequences like 'ei' + 'e' I tend to
produce sequences like 'eye' or 'eiye'.  Even without an original high
vowel, I tend towards consonantal glides, thus I more readily pronounce 'e'
+ 'e' as 'eye' than as 'e?e' (using '?' for the glottal stop), and 'o' + o'
tends towards 'owo' for me.

As far as I can see, these sorts of processes could produce most of the 'w'
and 'y' sounds reconstructed for PIE.

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