Sérgio
Meira
Leiden
University,
The Netherlands
Most
languages of the Cariban family (one of the three
major language families in lowland South America) present a pattern of
stem-initial vowel alternation involving the vowels e (the 'front grade') and o or schwa (the 'back grade') which,
though not always the same in every language, is still sufficiently similar to
be regarded as a unified phenomenon throughout the family, to which we propose
the name 'ablaut', given its similarities with the alternation patterns in
Indo-European languages that receive the same name. In this paper, a hypothesis is presented
according to which (a) the ablaut stems were originally (in Proto-Cariban) schwa-initial, (b) there were two elements
(morphemes?) i- and j-, related to possessive morphology,
(c) these two elements caused certain changes in the erstwhile schwa-initial
stems, leading to the present distribution of front and back grades in the
possessive paradigms of the daughter languages. |