Indo-European ablaut: Encyclopedia II - Indo-European ablaut - Ablaut in Proto-Indo-European

Indo-European ablaut - Ablaut in Proto-Indo-European

Proto-Indo-European had a characteristic general ablaut sequence that contrasted the vowel phonemes e/ē/o/ō/ø through the same root. This means that the basic vowel, a short /e/, could be replaced by a long /e/, a short /o/ or a long /o/, or it could be omitted. When a syllable had a short e, it is said to be in the "e-grade"; when it had no vowel, it is said to be in the zero grade, etc.

The historical development in pre-Indo-European will presumably have been that the original e-grade, which could be long or short, underwent two changes in certain phonological environments: under certain circumstances it changed its colouring to (long or short) o (the o-grade), and in others it disappeared entirely (the zero-grade). Originally these five grades of ablaut will have borne a purely allophonic relationship to each other, but later they came to carry meaning, distinguishing both lexis and grammatical form. The phonological conditions which controlled ablaut have been partly but not entirely explained; a key factor was the position of the word stress. Note that when we refer simply to the e-grade or o-grade, we mean the short vowel forms, unless the lengthened grades are specified. The e-grade is sometimes called the full grade. A classic example of the five grades of ablaut in a single root is provided by the different case forms of two closely related Greek words:

We are interested here in the syllable in bold print. Crucial is also to notice which syllable carries the word stress - that in italics, and in Greek, that with the diacritic. In this untypically neat example, we see a switch to the zero-grade when the word stress moves to the following syllable, a switch to the o-grade when the word stress moves to the preceding syllable, and a lengthening of the vowel when there is no inflection.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Ablaut in Proto-Indo-European", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki