Indo-European ablaut: Encyclopedia II - Indo-European ablaut - The zero grade

Indo-European ablaut - The zero grade

The zero grade of ablaut is the one which causes most people the greatest difficulty. In the case of *ph₂trós, which may already in PIE have been pronounced something like /pət-'ros/, it is not difficult to imagine this as a contraction of an older *ph₂terós, pronounced perhaps /pət-er-'os/, as this combination of consonants and vowels would be possible in English too. In other cases, however, the absence of a vowel strikes the speaker of a modern western European language as unpronounceable.

To understand this, one must be aware that PIE had a number of sounds which in principle were consonants, yet could operate in ways analogous to vowels. We are thinking here of the four syllabic sonorants, the three laryngeals and the two semi-vowels.

The syllabic sonorants are m, n, r and l, which could be consonants much as they are in English, but could also be held on as continuants and carry a full syllable stress; when this happens, we transcribe them with a small circle beneath them (for technical reasons a dot has been used in this wiki article: ṃ, ṇ, etc). Compare r and l in the modern Slavic languages, or m and n in some African languages: in Srb, the Serbian word for "Serb", the r carries much the function of a vowel; in the African word Ngazija, the name of a Bantu language, the initial N- should be pronounced with a pulse (nasal plosion), as a full syllable, without the help of a vowel.

The laryngeals could be pronounced as consonants, in which case they were probably variations on the h sound, hence we normally transcribe them h₁, h₂ and h₃. However they could also carry a syllable stress, in which case they were more like vowels, hence some linguists prefer to transcribe them ə₁, ə₂ and ə₃. The vocalic pronunciation may have originally involved the consonantal sounds with a very slight schwa before and/or after the consonant.

The phonemes u and i could be semi-vowels, probably pronounced like English w and y, or they could be pure vowels.

Thus any of these could replace the ablaut vowel when it was reduced to the zero-grade: the pattern CVrC (eg. *b^herg^h-) could become CrC (*b^hrg^h-).

When the ablaut vowel was followed by i or u, the result was a diphthong. Ablaut is nevertheless regular, and looks like this:

However, not every PIE syllable was capable of forming a zero grade; some consonant structures inhibited it in particular cases, or completely. So for example, although the preterite plural of a Germanic strong verb (see below) is derived from the zero grade, classes 4 and 5 have instead vowels representing the lengthened e-grade, as the stems of these verbs could not have sustained a zero grade in this position.

The zero grade can be compared to the partially parallel phenomenon in the semitic languages whereby there too the vowels can change their length and quality (including reduction to zero) allophonically. The comparison should be treated carefully, however, as the theory that PIE was originally a consonantal language like Proto-Semitic is highly controversial.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The zero grade", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki