Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Proto-Indo-European/reply (9)

Sorry, maybe I wasn't quite clear. Ablaut is the changing of the vowels itself. The root is seh₁- which has the basic meaning "to sow". The suffix -men-, when attached to roots, creates neuter proterokinetic nouns. So, seh₁- + -men- results in the noun which has the stem séh₁mn̥- in the direct cases, and sh₁m̥én- in the oblique cases. The 'ablaut' here is the change in the vowels, from seh₁ to sh₁, and from -men- to -mn-.

The change from w to u is unrelated and has to do with the way PIE treates certain consonants. The six 'sonorants' in PIE are l, r, m, n, y and w. They are normally consonants, not vowels. But when the zero grade of a syllable appears, that syllable will have no vowels, and so the sonorants are often changed into vowels according to certain rules. When they are to be pronounced as vowels, they are written as l̥, r̥, m̥, n̥, i, u. So those six letters are just 'vowel forms' of the sonorant consonants. The rules are as follows:


 * A sonorant will be a consonant if it is next to a vowel, or if a vowel and a laryngeal are before it. It will become a vowel if there are only consonants beside it.
 * But if there are two or more consonants before it, a sonorant will change into a vowel even when there is a vowel after it.
 * If several sonorants are next to each other, then start with the last one and apply the two rules above. Then move to the one before it, and repeat.

The inflection of one of the two present aspect stems of the root ǵneh₃- uses a so-called "nasal infix", which is rather unusual but it follows the same rules. The nasal infix is formed by adding it after the vowel of the zero-grade form of the root. The zero grade of ǵneh₃- is ǵn̥h₃-, so it is inserted here: ǵn̥_h₃-. The infix itself also has ablaut and accent changes: it is -né- in the singular forms and -n̥- in the nonsingular forms. So together, you get two stems: ǵn̥-né-h₃- in the singular, and ǵn̥-n-h₃- in the nonsingular (with the accent and e-grade in the ending). The result, with added endings, is:


 * ǵn̥-né-h₃-mi
 * ǵn̥-né-h₃-si
 * ǵn̥-né-h₃-ti
 * ǵn̥-n-h₃-m̥ós - m̥ is a vowel here, not a consonant, because two consonants (n and h₃) are before it
 * ǵn̥-n-h₃-té
 * ǵn̥-n-h₃-énti