Hallo conlangers!

On Friday 12 October 2012 22:28:33 Eric Christopherson wrote:

> [...]
> Jörg wrote:
> > My personal hypothesis is that several vowels collapsed into *a
> > in an earlier stage (in fact, all except *i and *u),
> 
> [...]
> 
> So you interpret the zero-grade *i *u as (at least sometimes) primary,
> rather than always reflecting a reduction of **ey **ew (or the like)?

Sort of.  I prefer to avoid the notion of a language that has only
one vowel phoneme.  So there'd be */i/ and */u/ besides */a/.

What happened IMHO was that there was a penultimate accent.
Under the accent, vowels were (slightly) lengthened, then *[i:]
and *[u:] diphthongized; *[a:] became /e/.  Short */i/ and */u/
remained what they were, while short */a/ was reduced and in most
instances lost.  Of course, the diphthongs */ai/ and */au/ could
also have existed in the trivocalic Pre-PIE; they would have
merged with */i/ and */u/, respectively.  (I think that roots of
the types *Cei- and *Ceu- without a closing consonant continue
such diphthongs.)

I know that this hypothesis alone does not cut it; there certainly
were other factors in play as well.  Jens Elmegård Rasmussen has
done some work in this direction (J. E. Rasmussen, Is the Indo-
European lexical accent predictable?, in R. Lühr & S. Ziegler (eds.),
_Protolanguage and Prehistory.  Akten der XII. Fachtagung der
Indogermanischen Gesellschaft 2004.  Wiesbaden: Reichert 2009).
 
> > I call the change described above the "Great Vowel Collapse"
> > (GVC); this seems to have been preceded by a change I call
> > "Resonant Conditioned Lowering" (RCL), which means that *i
> > and *u were lowered before nasals, liquids, semivowels and
> > vowels in hiatus (explaining the lack of *CeiR and *CeuR
> > roots).
> 
> It's been a long time since I read about PIE. Is it the case that there are
> roots like *newn= (syllabic n) but not *newn (asyllabic n)?

*newn= is the commonly reconstructed form for the numeral '9';
*newn indeed does not seem to exist.

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