Page:The Making of Latin.djvu/48

34 Root stā- ‘to stand, make to stand,’ Gr. (Doric). Root dō- ‘to give,’ Gr. .
 * Sans. ti-ṣṭhā́-mi.
 * Lat. stā-re, stā-men beside status.
 * Sans. dā́-da-mi.
 * Lat. dō-num beside datus, and also damus, datis, dabo.

§ There seems to have been under some special conditions a still further weakened stage in which even the -a- completely vanished: Sans. devattás ‘god- given’ stands for *deiu̯o-d-tós; and Lat. vici-ss-im ‘by giving in turn’ seems to show the same grade of the same root with -ss- from -d-t- (§ 166); on -im see § 269.

§ The changes just described happened in a period of the I.Eu. parent speech long before any of the descendant languages had split off. But at a later period, not long before the earliest separation, perhaps as recently as 8000 or even 2000 B.C., the character of the Accent had become more musical (§ 65). This seems to have produced quite a different kind of effect on the vowels of unaccented syllables. These were not shortened or crushed out as unaccented vowels had been in the Stress-accent period, but changed in quality. Thus -e- (and probably -a-) in a syllable preceding the accented syllable became -o-. This affected a great number of words which had been created in the language after the period of Stress-accent was over. Thus from I.Eu. *lég̑o ‘I tell, count’ were formed abstract nouns *log̑ā́ and *log̑ós