Re: Thematic vowel etc

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 10:21:19 +0000, tgpedersen
> <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> >
> >The Russian adj. inflection in m.nom. has ´-yj, but when stressed
> >it's -ój.
> >Now here's a hen-or-egg discussion:
> >1) did the /o/ attract the stress? or
> >2) did the stress change the /y/ to /o/?
>
> In fact, the /o/ is there also when unstressed (it's just
> not written, under Church Slavic influence). For instance,
> <russkij> is pronounced [rúsk&j] (St. Petersburg
> pronunciation, I think).
>
> The nom.sg. ending is historically -U + jI, which makes
> -UjI, written -yjI (the letter <y> is a ligature of <U> and
> <i>), and partially so pronounced, but not in a large part
> of Russia, where the development is regular: final yer is
> deleted, previous yer becomes a full vowel, so -UjI > -oj.
>
> >The most reasonable seems of course to assume 2).
> >We know that o-grade of an ablaut vowel occurs when stress has

been

> >shifted from somewhere else to that vowel.
>
> Do we?
>

Hm. That's one of the theories I picked up from several of the erh,
exchange of ideas that have taken place here. I know that subject
isn't exhausted.

> >Supposedly, the first
> >step was that all stressed ablaut vowel got e-grade and the rest

of

> >them zero grade. But the part about the zero grade can't be

right,

> >since how can a vowel in zero grade, in other words, that isn't
> >there, develop into an /o/ when it's stressed, when there is

nothing

> >there to be stressed? So I think Glen is right that in the first
> >step the unstressed ablaut vowels did not disappear (get zero
> >grade), but developed into some type of schwa, which then could
> >either get stress in the next step and become /o/, or not, in

which

> >case it disappeared and truly became zero grade.
> >
> >As for the verbal thematic vowel I can't say anything, but about

the

> >one in nouns I can make this observation:
> >Of all the things that were inflected like nouns in the

beginning,

> >the demonstratives were the only ones that were not syllabic.
>
> Why do you say that? I've never seen an asyllabic
> demonstrative.

I've reassigned *t-, *s-, *y- of the demonstratives to be sentence
connectives, as they are in Hittite. The result of that is that
demonstratives consist of *s-, *t-, *y-, which are non-syllabic,
plus suffix. Inevitably the result of that composition must be
stressed on the suffix.

>
> > That
> >means they could not possibly have stress anywhere in the stem,

but

> >must have it on the suffix. Therefore the demonstratives grew a
> >vowel and now look as if they have a thematic vowel.
> >
> >Note this German example:
> >nom. das warme Wasser
> >dat. dem warmen Wasser "the warm water"
> >cf. without demonstrative
> >nom. warmes Wasser
> >dat. warmem Wasser "warm water"
> >Note the endings of the adj.!
> >
> >Now why does German do that?
>
> Because Germanic used to have definite and indefinite
> adjectives, just like Slavic, only using a different method:
> the definite adjectives were n-stems (the indefinite
> adjectives had mostly pronominal endings).
>
>

I know that, but I'm trying to give an explanation of what purpose
introducing the various sets of endings had.

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