--- In cybalist@..., "richardwordingham" <richard.wordingham@...>
wrote:
> Are you saying Proto-Slavic *tUrgU became Old Slavonic trUgU, where
>U
> is the very short vowel ('jer')?
Exactly.
> I am presuming that Proto-Slavonic /Ur/ < PIE /r./,
> where 'r.' denotes the syllabic liquid.
Yes, and *Ur can also continue Late PIE *ur (with short *u), but,
oddly enough, PIE *r. can also be reflected as *Ir in Proto-Slavic.
There were much speculation on that issue, but my impression is that
attemts to find a strict phonological rule that would predict *Ir or
*Ur have failed (the same chaos we have with Baltic _ur_ or _ir_,
reflecting PIE *r.).
> Do we have an e-mailable symbol for shortness? A colon (:) is
> massively confusing, as it is the IPA symbol for length! (U for
> short only works because we use capitalisation to denote
strangeness!)
Actually, on this list a colon has always been used only to denote
length, shortness being denoted by. U and I for Proto-Slavic yers are
more or less common on the Internet, and I guess they are capitalized
not because of their "shortness" (Proto-Slavic *o and *e were short
as well, and, pace Russian tradition, there most likely were nothing
_very_ short about *U and *I), but rather because of their schwa-like
(resp. "strange") articulation.
>
> Why would the proto-Romanians borrow the word for 'thorn'? It
makes
> no more sense to me than the Gallo-Romans borrowing the word
> for 'hedge' from the Germans, which they did! (French 'haie').
Actually, Proto-Slavic for thorn was *tIrnU (not *tUrnU). A merger of
Proto-Slavic *Ir and *Ur in *Ur is an Old Church Slavonic
development, so in that case *tIrnU doesn't fit like a glove. Of
course, one can speculate on the development like PSl. *Ir > pre-OCS
*Ur (> Romanian) > OCS *rU.
>
> I had always understood that Proto-Slavonic had the curious
syllable
> structure C(C(C))V. Does this mean that this apparent goal was
> completed independently in the Slavonic dialects?
Yes, the so called tendency to the raising sonority of a syllable (or
how is it called in English?) emerged already in Proto-Slavic, but
operated actually up to the 9th c. (thus in separate Slavic
languages).
Sergei