Everything about Indo-european Ablaut totally explained
In
linguistics, the term
ablaut designates a system of
vowel gradation (for example regular vowel variations) in
Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern
Indo-European languages. (For the general phenomenon, see
Apophony.)An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb s
ing, s
ang, s
ung and its related noun s
ong.
The term
ablaut (from German
ab- in the sense "down, reducing" +
Laut "sound") was coined in the early 19th century by the linguist
Jacob Grimm, though the phenomenon was first described a century earlier by the Dutch linguist
Lambert ten Kate in his book
Gemeenschap tussen de Gottische spraeke en de Nederduytsche ("Commonality between the
Gothic language and
Dutch",
1710).
Preliminary consideration
Vowel gradation is any vowel difference between two related words (for example
man and
woman) or two forms of the same word (eg.
man and
men). The difference need not be indicated in the spelling. There are many kinds of vowel gradation in English, as in most languages, and these are discussed generally in the article
apophony. 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).
For the study of European languages, one of the most important instances of vowel gradation is the historical Indo-European phenomenon called
ablaut, remnants of which we see in the English verbs
ride,
rode,
ridden, or
fly,
flew,
flown. For many purposes it's enough to note that these verbs are irregular, but understanding why they're irregular (and indeed why they're actually perfectly regular within their own terms) requires digging back into the grammar of the reconstructed proto-language.
Ablaut is the oldest and most extensive single source of vowel gradation in the Indo-European languages, and must be distinguished clearly from other forms of gradation which developed later, such as Germanic
umlaut (
man/
men,
goose/
geese,
long/
length,
think/
thought) or the results of English word-stress patterns (
man/
woman,
photograph/
photography). Confusingly, in some contexts, the terms 'ablaut', 'vowel gradation', 'apophony' and 'vowel alternation' may be heard used synonymously, especially in comparisons, but
historical linguists prefer to keep 'ablaut' for the specific Indo-European phenomenon, which is the meaning intended by the linguists who first coined the word.
Ablaut in Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) had a regular ablaut sequence that contrasted the five vowel sounds
e/ē/o/ō/Ø.
This means that in different forms of the same word, or in different but related words, the basic vowel, a short /e/, could be replaced by a long /ē/, a short /o/ or a long /ō/, or it could be omitted (transcribed as Ø).
» :
Ablaut can often explain apparently random irregularities. For example, the verb "to be" in Latin has the forms
est (he is) and
sunt (they are). The equivalent forms in German are very similar:
ist and
sind. The difference between singular and plural in both languages is easily explained: the late PIE root is *
es- (going back to an earlier
h1es- with subsequent loss of the laryngeal). In the singular, the stem is stressed, so it remains in the e-grade, and it takes the inflection
-t. In the plural, however, the inflection
-nt was stressed, causing the stem to reduce to the zero grade:
*es-ṇt →
*s-ṇt. When, much later, the daughter languages became uncomfortable with this nasal plosion, they introduced compensatory vowels after the /s/. See main article:
Indo-European copula.
Some of the morphological functions of the various grades are as follows:
e-grade:
Present tense of thematic verbs; root stress.
Present singular of athematic verbs; root stress.
Accusative and vocative singular, nominative/accusative/vocative dual, nominative plural of nouns.
o-grade:
Verbal nouns with ending stress.
Present tense of causative verbs; stem (not root) stress.
Perfect singular tense.
zero-grade:
Present dual and plural tense of athematic verbs; ending stress.
Perfect dual and plural tense; ending stress.
Past participles; ending stress.
Some verbs in the aorist tense (the Greek thematic "second aorist").
Oblique singular/dual/plural, accusative plural of nouns.
lengthened grade:
Nominative singular of many nouns.Further Information
Get more info on 'Indo-european Ablaut'.
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