----- Original Message -----

From: Piotr Gasiorowski

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Sunday, September 29, 2002 1:09 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] again the slavic methathesis

The words you quote belong to a distict set. They contained so-called syllabic liquids (*r, *l), actually realised as a very brief reduced vowel plus a liquid in Proto-Slavic (*Ir, *Ur, *Il, *Ul), but changing into real syllabic consonants e.g. in Czech and Serbo-Croatian. They did not undergo the metathesis rules as applied to *er, *el, *or and *ol (as in *bolto, *dolto, *gordU), but developed in their own special way (e.g. *tUrgU 'market' > OCS trUgU which may look like metathesis but elsewhere we get Cz. trh, S-Cr. trg, Pol. targ, Russ. torg. Romanian borrowed the word from a dialect in which the rhotic was syllabic, [tr.g], and since Romanian has no such sound, the perceptually closest approximation with an accmpanying central vowel was employed instead, [1r] = <âr>.

 

As for Balaton, the name comes from Blatno (Ozero) 'Muddy (Lake)' (from *boltIno _with_ metathesis, cf. German Plattensee). However, Hungarian did not permit initial /bl-/ at the time the name was borrowed (it is still a rare cluster, found only in recent loans), and an epenthetic vowel was inserted to make the word pronounceable to the Magyars: /blat-/ --> /balat-/, cf. /kral'/ 'king' (from *korljI, perhaps the single most recent loanword in Slavic to have been affected by metathesis) --> Hung. király. Also <szerda> 'Wednesday' represents a metathesis in Hungarian (to "repair" the difficult pronunciation of Slavic /sre^da/ or /sr^e^da/) rather than a direct representation of older *serda.

 

Piotr

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: alexmoeller@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Sunday, September 29, 2002 4:51 PM

Subject: [tied] again the slavic methathesis

So far I understood from Piotr, the methathesis is a phenomenom which happened in all slavic langauges , but in different period of times for each slavic language. I am not sure if I make a mistake here, but the south slavic methathesised the words somehow in the VIII century.It was said, the romanians and albanians got the slavic words from slavic bevore the words were methathesised by south slavics.So the rom. and alb. "dalta, balta" are the slavic words dlato, blato and the explanation fits.

I have a problem with this aspect:Rom. gârba= slavic grUbU, rom. vârSa= slavic vreSa, rom. hârciog= slavic hroCegU, rom. bârlog= slavic brUlogU.

The problem is that the hungarians have these words too. And they are without methathesis.So we have:In hungarian: görcs, görbe, vorsa, hörsök, borlog

The name of the lake Balaton is derived from Balta and there is too , no methathesis, otherways we should have had Blaton.When we speak about hungarian, we are already almost in the X century and this doesnt fit anymore with the explanation for dlato= dalta and blato= balta

Which should be then the explanation?

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