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Most philologists explain ablaut as the effect of the laryngeals in the parent Indo-European language. Ablaut is better explained as the remains of vowel gradation in Proto-Indo-European, where the change e/ê/o/ô/(null) was regular.
Laryngeals only explain that this basic form of vowel gradation led to several ablaut sequences, for example â/ô/(shwa) in presence of h2 (see Laryngeal theory for more details). In a similar way, in the presence of nasal and liquid consonants, several other ablaut sequences emerged.
Could somebody find some examples for this and move the above paragraph to the article? -- dnjansen 21:38 Mar 1, 2003 (UTC)
There was a request for accents and breathings in the Greek. Are these the correct forms?
-- teb728 1 July 2005 10:07 (UTC)
Wunderbar! Thanks. -- Doric Loon 3 July 2005 09:39 (UTC)
In the verb conjugation example “he bode” comes from *bhe-bhoidh-e. Is the stress really on the root syllable? If it were instead on the reduplication (i.e. *bhe-bhoidh-e), that would account for the switch to o-grade—with the word stress on the preceding syllable. If the stress is truly on the root syllable, what accounts for the o-grade? Or is this just an example of the article’s statement that “the phonological conditions which controlled ablaut have been partly but not entirely explained”? -- teb728 4 July 2005 04:46 (UTC)
As I understand it, the perfect is generally reconstructed with a stressed o-grade of the root in the singular and an unstressed zero-grade of the root in the plural: *bhe-bhóidh-e vs. *bhe-bhidh-érs. O-grade isn't always predictable as occuring in a closed syllable after the stress. -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 09:57, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
Benwing, I am not too happy about you putting three paragraphs on Arabic into the section on the zero grade. Yes, semitic does parallel the zero grade in so far as that a vowel can disappear there too, but PIE is not normally understood to have been a consonantal language in the sense that the Semitic languages are, so the parallel has limited value. In particular, I don't see the point in putting detailed rules of Arabic here, since you presumably are not claiming that the same rules applied in the same way in PIE. I suggest you move those three paragraphs to a suitable article on Arabic and restrict yourself here to a brief pointer with link to suggest that people struggling with the concept may find a look at Arabic clarifies things. -- Doric Loon 10:48, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
As there has been no answer to my comments above, I am moving the paragraphs in question here until it can be decided what to do with them. There may indeed be a partial parallel here with Indo-European Ablaut, but there is no way Ablaut functioned according to these Arabic rules. Therefore describing the rules here at such length is out of place. The paragraphs in question are:
I would suggest they be put into the article on Apophony, which deals with this phenomenon generally and not just in Indo-European. Or they could be put into the article on Arabic. But it would be better if this were done by someone who knows Arabic, so meanwhile I'm just depositing the text here. -- Doric Loon 08:12, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
Aha! Well, of course, there was no doubt in my mind that this was good material. I still think it is confusing to put it where it was. Since the section is on the zero grade in PIE, it is more distracting than helpful to focus so much either on Arabic or on syllable theory generally. I think we can derive more benefit from your insights by featuring them for what they are. You might consider whether it would be worth writing a new article on Syllabification (at present that is a rather useless stub), and contributing also to Apophony. That would allow you to expand this material, which I think it deserves. And we can link from the zero grade. (BTW, I go on holiday on Friday for three weeks, so don't be surprised if I suddenly drop out of the discussion!) -- Doric Loon 08:32, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Eequor has added a "technical" tag. Does anyone else think that this is too technical for ordinary readers? The subject of Indo-European philology IS highly technical, but I know of no discussions of it which are more beginner-friendly than the articles on Wikipedia. -- Doric Loon 11:52, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
I've added a sentence the opening paragraph. Does this make it clearer? -- Doric Loon 23:09, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
If Eequor is now happy, perhaps I can remove the "technical" tag? There has been no more comment here for six weeks. -- Doric Loon 09:42, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
Gall. Does this page make sense to any of you here? I read it... and I still have no idea what on earth it's about. So there's a sound change... so? Given that this is the English-language Wikipedia, could we maybe have some examples... in English? Please? And maybe a total re-write? Please? Matt Yeager 00:31, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
This IS a complicated topic, and I keep looking for ways to make the article easier to read. A lot of thought has gone into this, and it is already far more beginner-friendly than any published textbook I know. At the end of the day, there is no way to explain this which will not involve some concentrated thinking on the part of the reader who is encountering it for the first time. But if anyone can say that there is a specific point at which the article fails them, I will try to patch it. However, I won't accept that the solution is a dumbing down, with the most difficult ideas removed. If Matt is only interested in the results in English and not in their pre-history, we do have an article on Apophany which deals with this same question synchronically. -- Doric Loon 10:30, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
Oops, must have been thinking about theophany. I suppose apophany would be a blinding revelation of a sound law to a prophet like Karl Verner. -- Doric Loon 12:58, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
OK, I have attempted a new "gentle" opening section, to help beginners find their feet before the technical stuff begins. But I'm a little afraid that could sound condescending. Feedback please? -- Doric Loon 13:33, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
Can I suggest a couple of things that may be making things harder than they need be for someone completely new to this topic? - and I completely agree that it's never going to be easy ;-)
zero | e | ē |
o | ō |
BTW, you folks are very modest keeping the stub tag! Pfold 20:47, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
You lost me there. What does 'a system of vowel gradations' mean? Maybe an example would help? ping 08:09, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
ping 09:44, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
Lincher 15:12, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
Um, could you be a bit more specific about what you find lacking. -- teb728 05:05, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
![]() | This section needs expansion. You can help by
adding to it. (May 2010) |
Yeh, it's a fair point. We'll fix that and re-nominate. -- Doric Loon 09:20, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
Right, I've put in the books I used when writing the first version of the article. Sorry, it was remiss of me not to do this sooner. Various other editors have worked on the piece, and possibly they could add the materials they have used. But probably this is now enough. Does that ease your concern, Pfold? -- Doric Loon 09:37, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
Actually, one of the reasons I'm proud of this article is precisely that it makes a very highly technical topic more accessible to lay readers than any other description I've ever seen. If we want to go beyond the superficial observation that English verbs show vowel changes and give at least flavour of the immensity of the topic, let alone equip people to go off and use etymological dictionaries with real understanding, then then we do need the kind of depths which mean that a complete beginner will have to slog a bit. There's no way round that. But I'm sure there are still big improvements to be made, and we do need feedback from users who got stuck at a particular point. As for examples from other languages (we have English, German, Latin and Greek at the moment), yeh, that would certainly be worth looking at. -- Doric Loon 13:54, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
Since you asked for comments on the article, I ran it through AndyZ's semi-automatic javascript peer reviewer. For whatever they may be worth, here are some of its comments that may be applicable:
<div class="references-small"><references/></div>
.-- teb728 07:56, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
Doric I do not understand your revert. No, the article does not discuss what happened to verb associated nouns (nomina actionis if you want a term) in Germanic and the only discussion about Germanic is limited to verbs. The article only says something vague about ablaut in nouns in general being lost down to the modern Germanic languages. It thereby creates the wrong impression that going from PIE to Gmc ablaut became entirely a matter of verbs. I think that that is not true for some of the nomina actionis even today, let alone in earlier Germanic languages or Germanic itself.
Iarlagab 152.1.193.137 21:05, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
Considering some other unrelated introduction I saw, the intro of this article is very good! It starts with "in linguistics" and thereby immediately points out a topic/area of interest, next clause it explains what ablaut is, and the next sentence it gives an illuminating example. That will be my model for introducing a concept: context, define, exemplify. Said: Rursus ☻ 13:44, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
I can see from the past notes that people have worked very hard on this article. However, there is something basically wrong with one of the early examples as far as I can tell.
Some involve a variation in vowel length (quantitative gradation: man/woman), others in vowel colouring (qualitative gradation: man/men), and others the complete disappearance of a vowel (reduction to zero: could not → couldn't).
The example of apophony for man/woman as "quantity" is very poor because this is both quality and quantity. The quality change can be seen as a result of the quantity change, but that doesn't make it irrelevant.
I don't know that English has pure quantitative gradation in the sense intended, so it may be hard to find a good example, but giving a confusing example will make it difficult for someone trying to be clear about the types. Since the sentence's whole goal is to be clear about the types, a bad example negates the purpose almost totally. -- Armchairlinguist ( talk) 06:23, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
I don't think those are bad examples. I can think of no example in any language of vowel shortening in which you can say 100% that no speaker of the language sees qualitative changes. I'll bet the original PIE quantitative ablaut had qualitative nuances which we will never be able to reconstruct. So I see no problem with examples reflecting that: man > woman is primarily a vowel shortening caused by the stress shift, and any qualitative element is secondary. Incidentally, the a in woman is normally analyized as a schwa, which is a vowel so short that it is colourless, so it counts as a short version of any vowel. You can test this by observing that most speakers of English pronounce gentleman and gentlemen identically. Both a and e shorten to a schwa, which is so short you can't distinguish quality any more. But of course many speakers of English believe they do still hear quality here... What I am really saying is that there will be no examples which satisfy everyone. -- Doric Loon ( talk) 21:20, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
Continuing on the subject of poor examples, the article's first section contains the following: "And since there are many counterexamples like e.g. *deywó- and NPl. *-es which show pretonic and posttonic e-grade, respectively, we might never be able to find these rules anyway."
It's better to give a counter-example example here than not to, but since this example is not explained, it is literally impossible for someone not already familiar with the subject to understand why it is at all meaningful (it means nothing at all to me, even though I have a conceptual understanding of ablaut already). It would be much more useful if whoever added this example could expand it showing how it counters the point about stress. -- Armchairlinguist ( talk) 06:30, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
You're right - that example can't stay like that. -- Doric Loon ( talk) 21:24, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
![]() | This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Most philologists explain ablaut as the effect of the laryngeals in the parent Indo-European language. Ablaut is better explained as the remains of vowel gradation in Proto-Indo-European, where the change e/ê/o/ô/(null) was regular.
Laryngeals only explain that this basic form of vowel gradation led to several ablaut sequences, for example â/ô/(shwa) in presence of h2 (see Laryngeal theory for more details). In a similar way, in the presence of nasal and liquid consonants, several other ablaut sequences emerged.
Could somebody find some examples for this and move the above paragraph to the article? -- dnjansen 21:38 Mar 1, 2003 (UTC)
There was a request for accents and breathings in the Greek. Are these the correct forms?
-- teb728 1 July 2005 10:07 (UTC)
Wunderbar! Thanks. -- Doric Loon 3 July 2005 09:39 (UTC)
In the verb conjugation example “he bode” comes from *bhe-bhoidh-e. Is the stress really on the root syllable? If it were instead on the reduplication (i.e. *bhe-bhoidh-e), that would account for the switch to o-grade—with the word stress on the preceding syllable. If the stress is truly on the root syllable, what accounts for the o-grade? Or is this just an example of the article’s statement that “the phonological conditions which controlled ablaut have been partly but not entirely explained”? -- teb728 4 July 2005 04:46 (UTC)
As I understand it, the perfect is generally reconstructed with a stressed o-grade of the root in the singular and an unstressed zero-grade of the root in the plural: *bhe-bhóidh-e vs. *bhe-bhidh-érs. O-grade isn't always predictable as occuring in a closed syllable after the stress. -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 09:57, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
Benwing, I am not too happy about you putting three paragraphs on Arabic into the section on the zero grade. Yes, semitic does parallel the zero grade in so far as that a vowel can disappear there too, but PIE is not normally understood to have been a consonantal language in the sense that the Semitic languages are, so the parallel has limited value. In particular, I don't see the point in putting detailed rules of Arabic here, since you presumably are not claiming that the same rules applied in the same way in PIE. I suggest you move those three paragraphs to a suitable article on Arabic and restrict yourself here to a brief pointer with link to suggest that people struggling with the concept may find a look at Arabic clarifies things. -- Doric Loon 10:48, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
As there has been no answer to my comments above, I am moving the paragraphs in question here until it can be decided what to do with them. There may indeed be a partial parallel here with Indo-European Ablaut, but there is no way Ablaut functioned according to these Arabic rules. Therefore describing the rules here at such length is out of place. The paragraphs in question are:
I would suggest they be put into the article on Apophony, which deals with this phenomenon generally and not just in Indo-European. Or they could be put into the article on Arabic. But it would be better if this were done by someone who knows Arabic, so meanwhile I'm just depositing the text here. -- Doric Loon 08:12, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
Aha! Well, of course, there was no doubt in my mind that this was good material. I still think it is confusing to put it where it was. Since the section is on the zero grade in PIE, it is more distracting than helpful to focus so much either on Arabic or on syllable theory generally. I think we can derive more benefit from your insights by featuring them for what they are. You might consider whether it would be worth writing a new article on Syllabification (at present that is a rather useless stub), and contributing also to Apophony. That would allow you to expand this material, which I think it deserves. And we can link from the zero grade. (BTW, I go on holiday on Friday for three weeks, so don't be surprised if I suddenly drop out of the discussion!) -- Doric Loon 08:32, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Eequor has added a "technical" tag. Does anyone else think that this is too technical for ordinary readers? The subject of Indo-European philology IS highly technical, but I know of no discussions of it which are more beginner-friendly than the articles on Wikipedia. -- Doric Loon 11:52, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
I've added a sentence the opening paragraph. Does this make it clearer? -- Doric Loon 23:09, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
If Eequor is now happy, perhaps I can remove the "technical" tag? There has been no more comment here for six weeks. -- Doric Loon 09:42, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
Gall. Does this page make sense to any of you here? I read it... and I still have no idea what on earth it's about. So there's a sound change... so? Given that this is the English-language Wikipedia, could we maybe have some examples... in English? Please? And maybe a total re-write? Please? Matt Yeager 00:31, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
This IS a complicated topic, and I keep looking for ways to make the article easier to read. A lot of thought has gone into this, and it is already far more beginner-friendly than any published textbook I know. At the end of the day, there is no way to explain this which will not involve some concentrated thinking on the part of the reader who is encountering it for the first time. But if anyone can say that there is a specific point at which the article fails them, I will try to patch it. However, I won't accept that the solution is a dumbing down, with the most difficult ideas removed. If Matt is only interested in the results in English and not in their pre-history, we do have an article on Apophany which deals with this same question synchronically. -- Doric Loon 10:30, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
Oops, must have been thinking about theophany. I suppose apophany would be a blinding revelation of a sound law to a prophet like Karl Verner. -- Doric Loon 12:58, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
OK, I have attempted a new "gentle" opening section, to help beginners find their feet before the technical stuff begins. But I'm a little afraid that could sound condescending. Feedback please? -- Doric Loon 13:33, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
Can I suggest a couple of things that may be making things harder than they need be for someone completely new to this topic? - and I completely agree that it's never going to be easy ;-)
zero | e | ē |
o | ō |
BTW, you folks are very modest keeping the stub tag! Pfold 20:47, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
You lost me there. What does 'a system of vowel gradations' mean? Maybe an example would help? ping 08:09, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
ping 09:44, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
Lincher 15:12, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
Um, could you be a bit more specific about what you find lacking. -- teb728 05:05, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
![]() | This section needs expansion. You can help by
adding to it. (May 2010) |
Yeh, it's a fair point. We'll fix that and re-nominate. -- Doric Loon 09:20, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
Right, I've put in the books I used when writing the first version of the article. Sorry, it was remiss of me not to do this sooner. Various other editors have worked on the piece, and possibly they could add the materials they have used. But probably this is now enough. Does that ease your concern, Pfold? -- Doric Loon 09:37, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
Actually, one of the reasons I'm proud of this article is precisely that it makes a very highly technical topic more accessible to lay readers than any other description I've ever seen. If we want to go beyond the superficial observation that English verbs show vowel changes and give at least flavour of the immensity of the topic, let alone equip people to go off and use etymological dictionaries with real understanding, then then we do need the kind of depths which mean that a complete beginner will have to slog a bit. There's no way round that. But I'm sure there are still big improvements to be made, and we do need feedback from users who got stuck at a particular point. As for examples from other languages (we have English, German, Latin and Greek at the moment), yeh, that would certainly be worth looking at. -- Doric Loon 13:54, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
Since you asked for comments on the article, I ran it through AndyZ's semi-automatic javascript peer reviewer. For whatever they may be worth, here are some of its comments that may be applicable:
<div class="references-small"><references/></div>
.-- teb728 07:56, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
Doric I do not understand your revert. No, the article does not discuss what happened to verb associated nouns (nomina actionis if you want a term) in Germanic and the only discussion about Germanic is limited to verbs. The article only says something vague about ablaut in nouns in general being lost down to the modern Germanic languages. It thereby creates the wrong impression that going from PIE to Gmc ablaut became entirely a matter of verbs. I think that that is not true for some of the nomina actionis even today, let alone in earlier Germanic languages or Germanic itself.
Iarlagab 152.1.193.137 21:05, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
Considering some other unrelated introduction I saw, the intro of this article is very good! It starts with "in linguistics" and thereby immediately points out a topic/area of interest, next clause it explains what ablaut is, and the next sentence it gives an illuminating example. That will be my model for introducing a concept: context, define, exemplify. Said: Rursus ☻ 13:44, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
I can see from the past notes that people have worked very hard on this article. However, there is something basically wrong with one of the early examples as far as I can tell.
Some involve a variation in vowel length (quantitative gradation: man/woman), others in vowel colouring (qualitative gradation: man/men), and others the complete disappearance of a vowel (reduction to zero: could not → couldn't).
The example of apophony for man/woman as "quantity" is very poor because this is both quality and quantity. The quality change can be seen as a result of the quantity change, but that doesn't make it irrelevant.
I don't know that English has pure quantitative gradation in the sense intended, so it may be hard to find a good example, but giving a confusing example will make it difficult for someone trying to be clear about the types. Since the sentence's whole goal is to be clear about the types, a bad example negates the purpose almost totally. -- Armchairlinguist ( talk) 06:23, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
I don't think those are bad examples. I can think of no example in any language of vowel shortening in which you can say 100% that no speaker of the language sees qualitative changes. I'll bet the original PIE quantitative ablaut had qualitative nuances which we will never be able to reconstruct. So I see no problem with examples reflecting that: man > woman is primarily a vowel shortening caused by the stress shift, and any qualitative element is secondary. Incidentally, the a in woman is normally analyized as a schwa, which is a vowel so short that it is colourless, so it counts as a short version of any vowel. You can test this by observing that most speakers of English pronounce gentleman and gentlemen identically. Both a and e shorten to a schwa, which is so short you can't distinguish quality any more. But of course many speakers of English believe they do still hear quality here... What I am really saying is that there will be no examples which satisfy everyone. -- Doric Loon ( talk) 21:20, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
Continuing on the subject of poor examples, the article's first section contains the following: "And since there are many counterexamples like e.g. *deywó- and NPl. *-es which show pretonic and posttonic e-grade, respectively, we might never be able to find these rules anyway."
It's better to give a counter-example example here than not to, but since this example is not explained, it is literally impossible for someone not already familiar with the subject to understand why it is at all meaningful (it means nothing at all to me, even though I have a conceptual understanding of ablaut already). It would be much more useful if whoever added this example could expand it showing how it counters the point about stress. -- Armchairlinguist ( talk) 06:30, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
You're right - that example can't stay like that. -- Doric Loon ( talk) 21:24, 22 October 2008 (UTC)