Proto-Indo-European *a

Abstract

Abstract There are around sixty Indo-European roots that are (sometimes) reconstructed with a vowel * a in the scholarly literature that otherwise fully embraces the laryngeal theory. This number is extremely low compared to the number of morphemes in which the vowels that are traditionally reconstructed as * e and * o are found. This marginal status of the vowel * a is typologically odd and has led some scholars to deny the existence of a vowel * a in Proto-Indo-European or in a precursor of Proto-Indo-European. This paper discusses the comparative evidence for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European * a . It concludes that there is insufficient evidence for the reconstruction of * a for any stage of the proto-language.