Re: [tied] Re: One.

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 10958
Date: 2001-11-03


>> As for the expected Slavic development of word-initial *oi-/*ai-, I'd expect at least partial confusion of *ei- and *oi- there, like that of *e- ~ *o-/*a-, *eu- ~ *ou-/*au- (> *ju- ~ *u-) or *e:- ~ *a:-/o:- (> *e^- ~ *a-).

> To be sincere that confusion is a news
for me. Examples?

I say "jutro", you say "utro", I say "jezioro", you say "ozero" ..., <a->, <ja-> and <je^-> vary quite freely in OCS. I do not mean a complete merger in PSl, but local mergers leading to a lot of dialectal variation.
 
>> There are other possible examples, e.g. *iskati 'look for' (Lith.
ies^k-, Germanic *ai(s)-sk- 'ask, seek'). I'm not sure if the accent is significant.

> But what about recently discussed Slavic *(j)e^snU ~
Lith. ai's^kus? The pitch accent is the same.
 
Right. That's what confusion is about :)). Either the etymology is wrong (we don't even know for sure if the Baltic and Slavic etyma are related or similarly derived -- maybe the Slavic word is simply *a:s-no- < *h2ah1s-no-, i.e. related but not parallel), or the accent is NOT significant, or both. My point is that the reflexes of *oi-/*ai- in Slavic may be hard to predict.

>> _Final_ *-oi became *-i (via *-e.:)
in the nom.pl. of thematic masculines.

> Curiously enough, this is
often ascribed to the effect of the _circumflex_ accent (which is rather unnatural for me if we accept at least the assumed original Baltic phonetical rendering of a diphthong's circumflex: it's the _first_ component which is acoustically more prominent, not the second one).
 
... which simply means that there are still problems waiting to be solved.
 
Piotr