Re: [tied] Lith. Acc.pl.

On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:

> On Mon, 30 Sep 2002 14:29:26 +0200, "Sergejus Tarasovas"
> <S.Tarasovas@...>
> wrote:
>
> >>>In the plural, we have a different picture.  The acuteness of the
> >acc.pl. (and
> >the nom.pl. of adjectival o-stems), apparently reflects the PIE short
> >prosody of
> >e.g. o-stems nom.pl. *-oy and acc.pl. *-ons, as opposed to long prosody
> >in the
> >oblique (e.g. G.pl. *-o~m).
> >
> >Where does the notion of "PIE short vs. long prosody" reflecting as
> >Balto-Slavic acute vs. circumflex comes from (and what does that mean
> >phonetically)? Could you provide me with any references or have you and
> >Jens just coined this out some hours ago? :)
>
> I was referring to the difference between e.g. nom.pl. *-oy (Greek and
> Lith.
> -oí) vs. loc.sg. *-oi (Greek and Lith. -oi~).  [Or, as Jens put it: "...
> showing
> that plain *-o- + the consonant /y/ yielded acute tone (or, had short
> prosody)
> in word-final in the source of both languages (which can hardly be
> anything
> other than PIE). They also show that the concatenation of *-o- and the
> deictic particle /i/ of the locative yielded Gk. Isthmoi~, Lith. namie~
> with a different (circumflex, longer, or disyllabic) prosody from the one
> of the nom.pl."]

I second that, perhaps not surprisingly. I'd like to add two notes:

1. The acc.pl. of o-stems has a long vowel in IE, being *-o:ns to judge
from Skt. -a:n. That makes the acute of Lith. -ùs/-úos- unproblematic.

2. Final syllables are a nuisance. Being happy about the nice and tidy
correspondences between Greek and Lithuanian in nom.pl. -oí : -ì/-íe- vs.
loc.sg. -oi~/-ie~, one is just frustrated to the point of depair when the
Greek optative 3sg lú:oi (not +lu~oi) is found to correspond to Lith.
te-sukie~ (the socalled permissive, 'let him turn'), since here we know
there was a laryngeal, PIE *-oyH1-t. To make it worse, Slavic has nom.pl.
-i, loc.sg. -e^, ipv. (< opt.) -i. Do we have to posit an individual line
of correspondences for each single item (when laryngeals are put in, the
inputs *are* different)? Or could the Slavic imperative have been
influenced by the form it would have after /y/, i.e. -i, just as the
loc. of jo-stems ends in -i ??

Jens