The Fourth Vowel

J.W. Richter

Introduction
Incredible as it is we will have to consider the idea of a controlled design for the European pronouns, which deliberately had been spread amongst the European population. From a central Alpine standpoint the system had been set to the following scheme1: The southern Ego-pronoun had been set to iou, transforming to io The western Ego-pronoun had been set to ieu, transforming to je The easthern Ego-pronoun had been set to iau, transforming to ja The southern Ego-pronoun had been set to ihu, transforming to ih

Three of these original three-letter pronouns (iou, ieu and iau) have been confirmed by Alpine dialects, but the fourth root pronoun ihu resulting in the German pronoun ih and the English I is missing. Basically each root pronoun applies its own set of vowels consisting of an I and a U, and a direction-dependent E, O, A and H. The letter H however for the northern pronouns usually will not be considered as a vowel. It will have to be checked whether the H had been used as a vowel to generate a symmetrical pronoun design for the European area.

The basic I*U-Structure

In the Alps the Ego-pronoun2 seemed to have been derived from a universal I*U-structure, which just like the cross-roads at Andermatt diverted in four directions3.

The Southern Pronouns

To the south into the Ticino valley the pronoun developed to IOU, resulting in an Italian io and in the Roman sky-god *IOU-pter or Jupiter. In Sicily the pronoun lost the o and transformed to iu.

The Western Pronouns

Towards the west, following the Rhone valley the pronoun developed to IEU, resulting in an Occitan ieu and in French je and in the French sky-god Dieu.

1 Andermatt Center of the Celtic Anderworld 2 The personal pronoun of the first person singular 3 Andermatt Center of the Celtic Anderworld

Fig. 1: Schematic Distribution Map for the Ego-Pronouns

Background map after Atlas of the Celtic World, by John Haywood; London Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2001, pp.30-37. 4

The Eastern Pronouns

Eastwards in the Swiss valleys the universal I*U-structure transformed to the Jauer-language, which uses the Ego-pronoun IAU. The corresponding sky-god must have been a Dyausderivate, but seems to have been lost. In eastward directions the pronouns deteriorated to ja, which is a common pronoun in a great number of Slavic countries.

The Northern Pronouns

Northwards along the rivers Aare and Rhine the universal I*U-structure transformed to the Egopronoun in German Ih and English I, by losing all OU-traces. With a growing distance from the Alps the deterioration of the Ego-pronouns increases. In fact the deterioration reaches a maximum at the borders of European territories 5. The trailing u-symbol vanishes as may be seen in the following table, in which English and German even lost two characters from the original I*U-pattern:

4 Published by Dbachmann for the Wikimedia Commons under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 5 From lists in The Hieroglyphs in the Ego-Pronoun we may identify the deteriorated pronouns.

Direction South West East North

Genuine Pronoun IOU ( Jupiter) IEU (Provencal) IAU (Jauer dialect) IHU

Deteriorated Pronoun 1 Io (Italian), Iu (Sicilian) Je (French) Ja (Slavic)

Deteriorated Pronoun 2 Yo (Spanish) Dji (Walloon) I (English)

Ih (southern German dialect) Table 1: Deterioration of Pronouns

Schematic Distribution Map for the Pronouns

The Schematic Distribution-map reveals a remarkable symmetry, which seems to have been set up deliberately. Symmetry would be perfect if the letter H had been used as a (sacred) vowel.

Fig. 2: Schematic Distribution Map for the Ego-Pronouns

The letter H in YHWH

There is one strong indication to consider H as a vowel if we inspect the Tetragrammaton YHWH in which the H is found at a central and at a trailing position. The sound may be identified in the spoken words Jehovah and Yahweh, in which it alternately represents the a and the e-sound.

The Greek letter H

From A is for Ox - A short history of the alphabet I learned (in an abbreviated summary): The Phoenicians called the H-character het (meaning fence), probably starting with a heavy, back-of-the -throat sound akin to the /ch/ at the end of the Scottisch word loch6. The cleaner sound of our modern /h/ was used in Semitic languages but already had a character assigned to it (the letter E started life as he). Het changed with the Greeks, who used it heta (pronounced hayta. The letter lost the /h/ and became eta, used to represent another vowel. The letter kept its /h/-sound long enough to be used by the Etruscans. Its shape had changed very little from the Phoenicians' form and didn't change at all until the Romans adopted it around 600 BC. Called ha by its new owners, it lost its top and bottom rungs leaving the form we use today: H.

From this short overview it may be clear that at least the Greeks considered the H as a vowel. The eta in fact represents the -sound. Although it may have been spoken as ch in the German Ich or even ck in the Dutch Ic the H originally had been representing an -sound as a genuine vowel. The -sound may have been considered as something between A and E, representing the middle between an a and an e-sound, which must have been the eta. In fact the very name eta already contains both elementary vowels E and A. The eta-sound must have evolved from an -sound to ch in a number of languages such as German and Dutch.

Just as an Idea...
In fact the name IEHOVAH, if it is written as IEHOUAH, merely consists of the six characters I, E, H, O, U and A, each of which in a strictly religious sense, must be considered as vowels. The letters I and U had been reserved as the main androgynous symbols, which leaves us four vowels to represent and encode the four wind directions north, south, east and west in the pronouns... Now, what would happen if we would take Johannes Aventinus' Annals of Bavaria for granted (as it is quoted in the version of Compendium of World History (Vol. 2) by Herman L. Hoeh. The ancient Bavarian history describes a systematic and well-designed build-up of European sub-structures with assigned and dedicated kings who had been selected from the ancestor's (Tuisco) clan. Although it will take some time to find some correlations between the names and the corresponding pronouns a structured European architecture may be expected and reconstructed, if it had been used to start civilization according to a master plan.

6 From A is for Ox - A short history of the alphabet by Lyn Davies

The Ego-Pronouns in the neighborhood of Chur

There is only one location in the Alpine region where all variants for the Ego-pronoun are concentrating inside an area of only 20 miles. Around the Swiss cities Chur, Davos, Scuol and St. Moritz the Ego-pronouns jeu (Sursilvan), jou (Sutsilvan, ja (Surmiran), eau (Puter), jau (Jauer) and eu (at Scuol).

Fig. 3: Concentration of all Ego-pronouns within 20 miles Chur is known as the oldest town of the Switzerland and has been documented as the first episcopal center at the northern side of the Alps (installed 450 AD). The name "chur" derives perhaps from the Celtic kora or koria, meaning "tribe", or from the Latin curia. Early settlement of episcopal control may indicate an influence of the Church in defining Egopronouns. As a remarkable fact the Ego-pronouns around Chur seem to follow the same rules as those on an enlarged scale: at the west-side we find jeu, which is also found in the Provencal language. At the south-side we find the Sutsilvan jou, which governs Italy (Jupitter). At the eastside we find the Jauer-language which abbreviates toja - found in at Slavic countries in the east.. The linguistic center of the European Ego-pronouns seems to be located in Chur, Switzerland.

Summary
From a central Alpine viewpoint the Europeans (even the Germans and the Dutch) used sets of genuine vowels to create their Ego-pronouns. They applied a strict schematic scheme, in which merely vowels were allowed to be used for the Ego-pronouns, which all started as three-vowel sets, but transformed to two-vowel words by eliminating the u-sound: The southern Ego-pronoun had been set to iou, transforming to the vowel set io The western Ego-pronoun had been set to ieu, transforming to the vowel set je The easthern Ego-pronoun had been set to iau, transforming the vowel set ja The southern Ego-pronoun had been set to ihu, transforming to the vowel set ih

The use as a H-vowel however started with the Greeks, which would imply that the distribution scheme may have been setup under the influence of Greek wisdom. On the other hand the vowel set included in the name IEHOUAH may have been used as an inspiring source as well... The linguistic center of the European Ego-pronouns seems to be located in Chur, Switzerland.