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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Are Proto-Indo-European stems one syllable?
In-Reply-To: ftilley@indirect.com's message of Sat, 17 Jun 1995 02:08:00 GMT
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Date: Mon, 19 Jun 1995 18:32:47 GMT
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In article <DAAoLC.Dun@indirect.com> ftilley@indirect.com (Felix E. Tilley Jr.)
writes:

>Are all proto-Indo-European stems one syllable, or are the some with
>two-syllable stems?  I am going by Partridge's Origins, and all the stems he
>mentions are one syllable in length.

Indo-Europeanists distinguish between *roots*, which are always CVC (with some
co-occurrence restrictions on the two Cs), and *stems*, which consist of a root
and one or more *suffixes*.  *Endings* are attached to stems; note that a bare
root can act as a stem with regard to endings.

The restrictions are:

1.  A voiceless stop will never co-occur with a voiced aspirate:  There is
neither *tebh- nor *dhep- to be found.

2.  A root may not contain two voiced plain stops:  There is no *bed-.

The vowel in roots is the ablaut-vowel usually written *e/o (that is, it
appears as either *e or *o depending on morphological context).

Suffixes are of the form -VC, again with the ablaut-vowel.  Depending on
morphology, either the root-vowel or the stem-vowel will drop ("zero-grade").

Stems are probably monosyllabic at the morphological level, although at the
phonetic level resonants can become syllabic in appropriate contexts.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
