Abstract
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is characterized by vowel alternations known as ablaut, a process with major effects in the early Indo-European languages. The parallel nouns ‘father’ and ‘brother’, for instance, differ in the vocalism of their initial syllables: accusative singulars *ph₂-tér-m̥ and *bʰréh₂-ter-m̥. Both also show inner-paradigmatic ablaut of *-ter-: e.g. dative *ph₂-tr-éi. Often, fuller vowels are accented, and more reduced grades are unaccented, though there are many counterexamples. I will outline two paradigms for PIE accent and ablaut. The first is the popular “compositional” approach (Kiparsky 2010, etc.), proposing that every morpheme in PIE is underlyingly either accented or not, with rules determining which accent surfaces (or assigning new accents). Kiparsky argues, for instance, that the root syllable of *bʰréh₂-ter- is underlyingly accented, while *ph₂-ter- is underlyingly unaccented. I argue that Kiparsky’s rules generate the wrong outcomes even in his own key examples. Some of these issues can be easily addressed, but others appear more intractable to me. I will then outline the largely marginalized theory of Fulk (1986), which takes a diachronic rather than synchronic approach, arguing that ablaut arose through a series of pre-PIE sound changes, starting from a hypothesized stage where the language was strictly CV in syllable structure. Thus *ph₂térm̥ would come from pre-PIE *pV.h₂V́.-tV́.rV.-mV, becoming *pV.h₂V.-tV́.rV.-mV by stress-clash avoidance, and with loss of all the unstressed vowels. By contrast, *bʰréh₂term̥ would come from *bʰV.rV́.h₂V.-tV́.rV.-mV, with the extra syllable of the root preventing stress-clash reduction, allowing both root and stem to keep their vowels into PIE. I contrast these two approaches, suggesting that while Fulk’s rules yield the desired outcomes more consistently, his highly speculative framework of at least four stages of pre-PIE make his theory hard to either prove or disprove.
Bio
Nelson Goering is a linguist and comparative philologist specializing in the prosody of the early Germanic languages. His monograph Prosody in medieval English and Norse was published in 2023, and he is now an MSCA postdoctoral researcher in ILN, working on metrical variations in different versions of the poems in Hervarar saga. He hails from the Ocooch ‘Mountains’ of Wisconsin (USA), and worked in England and Belgium before coming to Norway.