The System of nominal accentuation in Sanskrit and Proto-Indo-European . By A. M. Lubotsky (Memoirs of the Kern Institute, No. 4.) pp. xix 196. Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1988. Guilders 92, US $46.00.

Abstract

difficulty, and tries to provide a morphological explanation in the final chapter, by invoking R. S. P. Beekes's account of very early PIE nominal accentual patterns. At this very early stage, it is suggested, words with voiceless stops in the root belonged to a type of paradigm which had fixed root accent: this type disappeared early because of various inconvenient characteristics such as coincidence in form of nominative and genitive singular, and the nouns with high tone in their roots borrowed accented endings from the other type, thus becoming oxytones.