PIE syllabification of sonorants
Syllabification rules appear to have been applied in the following order:
Base rule
The base rule for syllabification of a sequence of sonorants was as follows:
Basic syllabification in PIE :: If the phoneme to the right of a sonorant is syllabic, the sonorant remains non-syllabic, else it is syllabic.^[2017. From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, p. 17]
The rule iterated from right to left.
- e.g. zero grade kwn- ‘dog’ forms the genetive kwn-és → ==kunés== but the locative plural kwn-sú → ==kwṇsú==.
Exceptions
Notable systematic exceptions to this rule include
- The nasal infix -né- never seems to exhibit syllabic ṇ in zero-grade.
- e.g. Core IE present stem linékʷ- ‘be leaving behind has a zero grade ==linkʷ-==
- The i-stem and u-stem accusative endings always exhibit sg. -im, -um rsp. and pl. -ins, -uns rsp.
- CRṚV may occur if CRṚC occurs elsewhere in the paradigm.1
- Word initial labial sonorant clusters mR- were always realised with both sonorants non-syllabic.
tidy | en | sembr | phonotactics | modelnote
Footnotes
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The example given by Ringe in From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic p. 18 could to my knowledge just as easily be explained by an underlying non-sonorant i rather than ỵ, if we posit that the former exists. ↩