Burrow T. The Problem of Shwa in Sanskrit

Clarendon Press, 1979. — 138 p.The problem dealt with in the present monograph was first discussed by me in an article published in the Transactions of the Philological Society, 1949 (1950), pp. 22-61, and entitled ‘ “Shwa” in Sanskrit’. The problem is the validity of the reconstruction shwa (a) which on the basis of equations such as Lat. pater : Skt. pita and Lat. status : Skt. sthita- has for the last hundred years been attributed to the parent Indo-European language. The argument of that article was that such words in Sanskrit on the one hand and the Western IE languages on the other do not correspond to each other exactly, that Sanskrit -i- is always to be derived from IE -i-, and that there is a morphological difference present in such Sanskrit forms, the -i- in question being sufhxal ( sth-ita -). As for the ablaut of the original long vowels it was argued that the alternation was between a normal grade (da-) and zero grade (da-d-mas; -tta ) and that in this arrangement there was no room for shwa.