Re: [tied] Re: Slavic peoples and places

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001 12:43:09 -0000, "Sergejus Tarasovas"
<S.Tarasovas@...> wrote:

>OK, surrender. I just can't recollect other examples (some
>Selishchev's paper). But my point was a bit wider than this popular
>insect: I tried (more or less cla:ra: voce) to evangelize the
>following hypothesis: in it phonemic inventory Proto-Slavic had a
>(potential) phoneme /W/ (used as a prosthesis before /o/ and /o,/,
>thus functionally different from (bilabial) /v/) with two allophones
>[w] and (voiced) [h].

That's a strange allophone-pair. I think Proto-Slavic had a rule,
more or less, that syllables (and words) had to start with a consonant
and to end with a vowel. If the initial consonant was etymologically
absent, [w-] was added before back vowels, and [j-] before front ones,
in general. But [?-] and [h-] were also acceptable. I don't think
the term "allophone" is appropriate, as the prosthesis was automatic,
and the prosthetic sound was not really a phoneme.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...