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The "Saussure effect" is a sound law that has been proposed to explain the loss of a laryngeal in the vicinity of an o-grade in Proto-Indo-European. The present article is a critical analysis of the material that is supposed to have undergone the "Saussure effect" in Indo-European languages other than Greek. It is concluded that the facts do not support the assumption that the "Saussure effect" has taken place in these languages.
1. The "Saussure effect"
In 1905, Ferdinand de Saussure observed that a rootfinal vowel was dropped if the root had o-grade: "Le type tÒr-now en regard de t°reyron n'a pas à passer pour fortuit ou anormal, mais pour RÉGULIER"(511, fn. 2). The focus of de Saussure's formulation is of course Greek, since that was the language which provided evidence for the root-final vowels which we now know to be reflexes of the laryngeals. In laryngealist terms, de Saussure's observation was described by Nussbaum as follows: "*H shows a vocalic outcome in neither the environment #_Ro nor in the environment oR_C. " (1997: 182). In a very thorough article on the subject, Nussbaum coined the term "Saussure effect" for this phenomenon (further "SE"). Since Meillet, it has been observed that the rule might apply to Indo-European languages other than Greek as well. Today SE is applied throughout Indo-European whenever we expect a trace of a laryngeal in the vicinity of an o-grade but do not find one.
It is immediately obvious that the conditions for the application as formulated by Nussbaum are peculiar at best. He discusses other sequences containing a laryngeal and an o-grade and concludes that in these sequences no regular laryngeal loss can be observed. One does wonder, though, if the *o caused the loss of the laryngeal, why then is the laryngeal preserved adjacent to *o in, e.g., Greek §g[asymptotically =] *h1eg-oh2, Greek p«u 'herd', Sanskrit páyú-'guard' *poh2-iu-, gáya-'life' *gwoih3-o-etc.? The only phonetic explanation given for this laryngeal loss that I am aware of is Rasmussen's theory of the consonantal *o. In his discussion of SE, Rasmussen concludes the following: "Es scheint also ein Laryngal nach dem Infix-o zu schwinden, wenn er der mittlere von drei Konsonanten war. Dieser Schwund ist offenbar von der schweren Konsonantenanhäufung hervorgerufen: Vor der...