Wyatt William F. Jr. Indo-European /a/

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970. — 83 p. — (Haney Foundation series, University of Pennsylvania, 6th).Wyatt tries to demonstrate that there is no need to attribute to Indo-European two different vocalic phonemes /a/ and /ə/, as maintained, for instance, in Brugmann's Grundriss: in all cases where the traditional grammars assume either IE a or IE ə it is possible to reconstruct /a/ and to attribute the different treatments to allophonic distinctions. In particular - according to Wyatt - IE a yields Indo-Iranian a either (a) if it is accented and belongs to the initial syllable of the word or (b) if it is found in an internal and closed syllable; it yields i in initial unaccented syllables and in internal open syllables. In final syllables the phonological environment does not seem to justify the different treatments, and Wyatt tentatively resorts to a different type of conditioning: '*/a/ in unstressed open syllables passes to Indo-Iranian /i/ save where grammatically relevant.