Re: Various loose thoughts

From: pielewe
Message: 36324
Date: 2005-02-15

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

> It's a fact that ljudIje and dêti behave differently from
> other i-stems. This may be due to their status as pluralia
> tantum, and/or it may reflect their etymological background.


Or their extreme frequency, which makes them prime candidates for the
role of "last Mohicans", the way the verbs meaning 'want/will/shall'
and 'can' are the only ones to have retained the 1sg ending -u in
standard SCr. (whittled down to 'want/will/shall' in most of
C^akavian and to nothing at all in Slovene), or the way the Russian
verb 'be' is the only one currently throwing back the stress on the
negative particle "ne".


[On the mechanism that gave rise to BSl. mobility.]


> That still doesn't explain -ovi, unless the dative falls
> under the "one or two other case forms", in which case one
> may as well dispense with Ebeling's law altogether.


I doubt one can build much on -ovi, for the following reasons:


(1) Granted for the sake of the argument that it did not retract the
stress in accordance with what Kortlandt calls Ebeling's law (it
can't have), it risked receiving stem stress analogically because all
other singular datives were stem-stressed.


(2) By the time Slavic is attested, the u-stems as an inflexional
pattern were no longer a distinct entity but were merging with the
masc o-stems, increasing the chances of mutual influence of any
conceivable kind.


(3) What about modern Russian end-stressed "domój" and "dolój"?


> A much
> simpler solution is to see the mobile stress as a direct
> continuation of Indo-European mobility, only extended
> analogically to vowel stems. The cases with end-stress in
> the paradigm of a PD stem like *dhug(h)&2té:r (Nsg., Gsg.,
> Isg., Gpl., Dpl., Lpl., Ipl., GLdu., DIdu.) are plus, the
> others are minus (although the Dsg. is a bit of a problem
> here too).


Perhaps also the o-stem Gsg (= Ablsg).

Whatever may have been the case, I do think that we urgently need an
update of this section of Kortlandt's theory, particularly in the
light of everything that has happened since 1975, notably the arrival
of the valency theory, which was not yet on the scene when "Slavic
Accentuation" was published.

> [...]

I'd written:

> >If I remember rightly, K puts the analogical introduction of the
> >pronominal ending *-o < *-od into the (at the time) oxytone neuter
o-
> >stems at some relatively late Balto-Slavic stage preceding
Ebeling's
> >law. The attested stem stress in these examples is then due to the
> >retraction he calls Ebeling's law. In that conception, it is not a
> >matter of circumflexes attracting the ictus, but of final
syllables
> >of certain shapes losing it.
>

Then you wrote:

> But that cannot be right. Only the oxytone o-stems with
> circumflex become mobile (meN^so, ja^je), not those with
> acute (vêdró) nor those with short vowel (peró).


Here again we are faced with a section of Kortlandt's theory that has
not been formulated explicit enough for me to understand it
completely. But let me see what I can do. After all one lives only
once. Or twice.


Synchronically speaking, the type of which "pero" is a representative
is squarely Stang's (b), which implies that it had fixed stem stress
in the period immediately preceding Dybo's law. (I'm no admirer of
the practice of referring to (b) as "oxytone" because it was barytone
during most of the pre-history of Slavic and only became oxytone as a
consequence of Dybo's law, only to turn into a new kind of mobile
pattern as a consequence of Stang's law.) Now in view of the way
neuter nouns are supposed to have arisen (more or less along the
lines developed by Illic^-Svityc^), there is no immediately
recognizeable source for (b)-stressed neuter o-stems. To the best of
my knowledge the rise of (b)-stressed neuter o-stems is nowhere
explicitly treated. But I've probably missed something.


The case of "ve^dro" is different, but yet again in a way that
highlights a point where the theory has not been formulated very
clearly, at least clearly enough to avoid misunderstandings. Read on.


It has not often been realized that Ebeling's law splits the mobile o-
stems into two subtypes, to wit one that undergoes retraction and one
that doesn't (in other words: remains oxytone). The latter type is
continued most clearly by such l-participles as modern
Russian "neslo" (see SA 5-6). However, the further history of the
subtype that did *not* retract the stress has not been reconstructed
in very sufficient detail, at least in published texts. As I
understand it (but I may be totally wrong here and I take all
responsibility for the collapse of the bridge -- might it collapse) K
assumes that masculine members of this subtype just merged with
ordinary mobile nouns at some Balto-Slavic stage, in other words that
they carried out Ebeling's law analogically. The case of neuter nouns
is different. In their case the unretracted subtype lived on and Rick
Derksen has argued in a way I tend to find attractive that it can be
used to explain certain types of "metatony" in Lithuanian that have
proved elusive and cannot be brought under some version of
Hjelmslev's law. [Please read Derksen's book, I can't summarize it
here or anywhere.]


The noun ve^dro may well be a specimen of this subtype. Since its
stem ends in -dr- it is formally of the non-retracting sub-type. At
first sight it looks like a (b), but it obviously isn't a genuine (b)
because in a genuine (b) the *e^ should be long and here it is short,
showing that it was unstressed before Dybo's law caused genuine (b)'s
to become end-stressed.

Then you exclaim in the context of plural datives and locatives.


> That's what seems totally backwards to me.


Tut-tut.


> The concept of
> "weak" and "strong" yers in the sense of Havlík's rule
> (pIpIrI'cI > pIprI'c) is clear enough, even given a few
> exceptions (irregular strong yers in a.p. a initial
> syllable, or sometimes before *j). But in Kortlandt's
> account yers are first weak (unaccentable) in final
> syllables only, although they are also unaccentable in
> medial syllables, which get skipped, except before *j. Then
> medial yers become accentable again, to account for the
> behaviour of Dybo's law, and only after that Havlík's rule
> sets in. I could accept that if it explained all the facts,
> and if it were the only way to explain the facts, but it
> doesn't, and it isn't. There is sufficient evidence that
> shows that when a final yer lost the stress, a preceding yer
> (strong, by definition) could and did receive the stress
> (*dhworikós > dvorIcI' > dvorI'cI > dvoréc; *moldikós >
> moldIcI' > moldI'cI > molodéc).


You haven't understood K's theory, which [and *please* pay attention
now, because I explained the same point on this very list only three
days ago] at no point of the chronology generates accentuations like
**dvorIcI'. Since the stressability of final jers is held to have
been lost *before* Dybo's law operated there is no way of getting o-
stem singular accusatives with stress on the final jer. This is a
central point of the theory which for some reason keeps getting
misunderstood.


Shënim: *dvorIcI is a derivation from (pre-Dybo) *dvòrU, which is (b)
and as such is assumed to retain the stress in suffixal derivations.
The MAS scheme (which K adheres to) unambiguously generates *dvòrIcI
here, which is shifted to *dvorÌcI by Dybo's law.


[By the way, I have never seen an accentological theory which
generates the length of SCr dvor, Gsg dvóra, and noz^, Gsg nóz^a, but
that's neither here nor there.]


> K.'s soundlaw would predict
> that the ins.sg. of mobile i- and u-stems (*-ImI, *-UmI)
> would be barytone/enclinomenic, which is incompatible with
> the evidence (adverbial R. verxóm cannot be secondary, and
> the word is an old oxytone, Lith. virs^ùs, so the u-stem
> a.p. c Isg. was *-U'mI without a doubt).


Nice.


> I also think the consequences of such a soundlaw have not
> been thought through completely. I notice that in his reply
> to Olander, Kortlandt says: "The obvious objection to
> Olander's proposal is that the accent would have been
> retracted in accordance with Hirt's law throughout a
> Balto-Slavic paradigm *suHnù- with fixed stress on the
> second syllable, so that accentual mobility could not have
> been preserved." But the same can be said for Kortlandt's
> model with regard to the "retraction from final yers
> skipping middle yers"-law (for want of a better name). K.'s
> model predicts *sy'nU, *sy'nU, *sy'nu, *sy'novi(?), *sy'nu,
> *sy'nUmI; *sy'nove, *sy'ny, *syno'vU, *sy'nUmU, *sy'nUxU,
> *synUmi', where it is hard to see how accentual mobility may
> have been preserved based solely on the G and I pl. (Stang
> p. 81 gives OR pl. sy'nove, sy'ny, syno'vU, syn(ov)o'mU,
> syno'xU, synmí).

Interesting point, but the Lsg should have been added to the list of
forms with a stressed ending. (Whatever its precise origin it is
obvious that the Lsg was end-stressed in (c)-stressed u-stems in
PSl.) And don't forget that an important component of a moble
paradigm was also the fact that the stem-stressed forms were clitic.
A learner of the language needed to hear, say *zà synU or *synU bò
only once to know that the word was mobile. And how many (a)-stressed
and (b)-stressed u-stems were available as a model for analogical
introductino of fixed stem stress? Preciously few if any. The
situation cannot be compared with the Olander reconstruction , which
renders the BSl predecessor of synU consistently stem-stressed, just
like, say, the word for 'brother'.


All of this is interesting and thanks for the opportunity of
discussing it,


Willem