--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "alex" <alxmoeller@...> wrote:
> Rosetti considers there are 3 layers of loans from
> Slavic. Very early loans (VI-XII century), the loans from OCS after
XIII
> century (begining with the time Alexandru cel Bun decided to turn
himself to
> the Slavic Church ?), and late loans from "modern" Slavic languages
(
> Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Russian)
That's of course very useful, but it won't do to smear out the
category of very old loans over the very centuries that arguably
constitute the most eventful period in Slavic phonological history.
From the point of view of loanword studies one of the most important
changes that took place during those years was the reorganization of
the vowel system that gave rise to Sl. o and the "jers"
or "semivowels". It has been realized since Paul Kretschmer's seminal
1905 article on Greek loans into Slavic that that reorganization had
not yet taken place while Slavic was undergoing the early phases of
its period of expansion. The earliest Christian loans into Slavic
still presuppose the old system, as does a massive layer of borrowed
toponyms and other onomastic material ranging from Novgorod to the
Pelopponesos. Yet preciously few Slavic loans into Albanian or
Romanian appear to presuppose the vowel system as it was before
Kretschmer's reorganization. That is not a trivial fact.
> Now, the problems with the oldest Slavic loans should be these
common words
> shared by Albanians, Romanians and Sout Slavs _only_. There is the
> possiblity they are not Slavic at all and I don't know if on this
field is
> some work done after Miklosic.
The notion strikes me as weird. Quite a few of those words are very
ordinary pan-Slavic stuff.
> Now let see see some words without methathesis:
> Rom. "bârlog"(den, lair), Slavic "brUlogU"
> Rom. "gârlã" (stream, brook), Slavic "grUlo"
> Rom. "vârf" (top) , Slavic "vrUxU"
> Rom. "cârcã" (pick-aback), Slavic "krUkU"
> Rom. "gârb" (bent), Slavic "grUbU"
> Rom. "dârz", (firm), Slavic "drUzU"
That is a misunderstanding. All of those words had a semivowel
preceding the resonant; the semivowel and the resonant underwent
metathesis, but the semivowel was weak (in the technical Havlík
sense) and went the way of the Avars in due course like all weak
semivowels (appr. tenth century), so that you end up with syllabic
resonants, as is still the case in Serbian and Croatian (and Slovene
and Czech and Slovak), e.g. "brlog", "grlo", "vrh" etc. Subsequently
new vowels developed, usually before the resonant, in much of South
Slavic, but not everywhere, with numerous local niceties and
complications. Since "gârlã" is obviously the most straightforward
way for Romanian to adopt a Slavic form [grlo], it does not point to
an early date. Indeed, if the borrowing was old we would expect
**gurlo, with the *u that was changed into a semivowel as a
consequence of Kretschmer's reorganization of the vowel system, cf.
*sutã* (if that is Slavic).
Difficult stuff all the same,
Hail to everyone,
Willem
> There are many curriosities in the phonetic aspect of the Slavic
words such
> as Rom. "o" for Slavic "a" as in "noroc"(luck) for Slavic "narokU"
but I
> don't intend to keep going on now:-))
>
> Alex
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> No virus found in this outgoing message.
> Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
> Version: 7.0.298 / Virus Database: 265.6.4 - Release Date:
22.12.2004