Indo-European Ablaut - Zero Grade

Zero Grade

The zero grade of ablaut may appear difficult. In the case of *ph₂trés, which may already in PIE have been pronounced something like, it is not difficult to imagine this as a contraction of an older *ph₂terés, pronounced perhaps, 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. These are 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, they are transcribed with a small circle beneath them. Compare r and l in some 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. Modern English dialects have a syllabic consonant /l/ as the final syllable of "bottle" and a syllabic /m/ in some pronunciations of "enthusiasm".

• The laryngeals could be pronounced as consonants, in which case they were probably variations on the h sound, hence they are normally transcribed as 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.

• In pre-vocalic positions, the phonemes u and i were semi-vowels, probably pronounced like English w and y, but they could also become pure vowels when the following ablaut vowel reduced to zero. When u and i came in postvocalic positions, the result was a diphthong.

Ablaut is nevertheless regular, and looks like this:

Thus any of these could replace the ablaut vowel when it was reduced to the zero-grade: the pattern CVrC (e.g. *bʰergʰ-) could become CrC (*bʰr̥gʰ-).

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.

Zero grade is said to be from pre-PIE syncope in unaccented syllables, but in some cases lack of accent does not cause zero grade: *deywó-, nominative plural *-es "god". There does not seem to be a rule governing which unaccented syllables take zero grade and which take stronger grades. Some Indo-Europeanists reject the syncope hypothesis, and instead understand early PIE as a Semitic-type language with discontinuous consonant roots and vowel transfixes.