University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970. — 83 pp.
/a/ has always been of central concern to Indo-Europeanists. The first scholars in the last century seriously to attempt the reconstruction of the Indo-European parent tongue derived all the non-high vowels of the European languages, that is to say /e a o/, from an original /a/ which contrasted in Indo-European only with the high vowels /i/ and /u/ in a three-vowel system. Later, as comparative methodology improved, and as the hold of Sanskrit on the minds and hearts of linguists began to weaken, Indo-European /a/ was split up, first into two vowels /e/ and /o/, still nostalgically written a1 and a2 by Brugmann in 1876 and de Saussure in 1879; and then finally into four (/e a o/ and the import from the Semitic world, schwa). This stage of six short vowels, save for later isolated aberrations, represented the highwater mark of the Indo-European vocalic system, a point from which that system has since been receding. Though /e/ and /o/ together with /i/ and /u/, frequently regarded as the vocalic allophones of /y/ and /w/, have successfully maintained their status as original elements of the vowel system, both /a/ and /ə/ have been expelled by many, /ə/ alone by some. In what follows I shall discuss these displaced vowels, in the hopes of finding a home for at least one of them in our grammars of Indo-European. I shall not be primarily concerned with how they were realized phonetically, but rather with their position in the system, that is to say, with the number of paradigmatic oppositions into which they entered. Did the Indo-European vowel system contain four distinctive vowels to be written /i u e o/ as laryngealists would have it; or five: /i u e o a/, as in Burrow's system; or six, as in the traditional analysis which includes /i u e o a ə/ ?
