On Mon, 13 Jan 2003 21:22:32 -0000, "Sergejus Tarasovas
<
S.Tarasovas@...>" <
S.Tarasovas@...> wrote:
>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
>
>> There are a few Avestan spellings showing no contraction in the o-
>stem
>> ablative (as.a:at~ca:, vira:at~ca:, Beekes Gatha-Avestan, p. 53).
>
>But Beekes himself thinks that "<-a:at~ca:> for /-a:t-ca/ is probably
>due to accent. In the Gathas it is found only in <as.a:at~ca:>
>28.10a, 32.4c and <vira:at~ca:> 31.15c [obviously, the spellings are
>more common in Late Avestan texts -- S. T.]. So it is a later
>innovation".
Whether the Avestan forms are cases of preserved hiatus or not (the
Avestan gen.pl. in -aam certainly is), there can be no doubt that the
ablative sg. in -o:t is contracted from -oot.
>By the way, Russian forms with [-v-] are traditionally supposed to
>spread from (originally rather narrow?) northern dialectal area,
>showing general lenition of intervocalic /g/ to [?] or [w]. And,
>IMHO, [h] and [w]-prostheses better fit with Late (since 8th c.?)
>Common Slavic *o [o] than earlier [a].
This perhaps true for w-, but for h- (which, apart from Northern
Russian, is what we have here) there is no motivation to prefer
rounded vowels over unrounded ones. Ukrainian, for instance, has h-
forms in combination with a (harba), e (hev), o (hostryj) and u
(hulycja). I would say the predominance of -h- (-g-) over -w- (-v-)
in the pronominal genitive favours a deeper timeline over a shallower
one.
>If the development of the
>prostheses is so late, how did the Slavs get along with anti-
>phonotactical *-oo-'s > *-aa-'s at least for centuries? If the
>development is very early, it can hardly be paralleled by obviously
>late (or what?) [h] and [w]-prostheses in anlaut, and the natural
>question rises: where else do you find such a hiatus-filling in Early
>Common Slavic?
The imperfect is the only other form with Common Slavic hiatus I can
think of (-e^a-, -aa-). In the OCS documents it is either preserved,
contracted (-e^-, -a-) or receives a -j- hiatus-breaker (-e^ja-,
-aja-). Whatever the origin of the Slavic imperfect, it is certainly
ancient, and the hiatus must have been preserved there for centuries.
I do not necesarily agree the prostheses are recent, especially in the
case of h-. In Ukrainian, Belorussian, Slovak, Czech and Lower
Sorbian, /h/ (/G/) is indeed a relatively recent development out of
Common Slavic /g/. But it is likely that there was a /h/-sound
somewhere in the Proto-Slavic <--> Common-Slavic period, initially as
an allophone of word-final -s (which explains such narrowings as -os >
-uh > -U or -o:is > -u:h > -y). In that period, insertion of hiatus
breaking -h-, both initially and medially, would have been quite a
natural thing to happen. The /h/ subsequently disappeared, as
'aitches do (unless it was sporadically preserved in those dialects
that acquired a new /h/ out of /g/). Only in the pronominal genitive
was it preserved, hardened to /g/ (except, again, in the /g/ > /h/
dialects).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...