From: pielewe
Message: 38084
Date: 2005-05-26
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
[On the prothetic v- in Cz vejce etc.]
> It's risky to generalize from a single example, but that
> would seem to indicate that the merger of *a: and *o: in
> Slavic is a relatively recent phenomenon.
>
There is an alternative explanation that takes into account the
circumstances that saw the rsie of prothetic vowels. It is generally
assumed that they arose as automatic transitional sounds during the
period when closed syllables had been eliminated, so that every word
that started in a vowel was preceded by a word that ended in a vowel
unless it stood at the beginning of a sentence.
Now, since the word for 'egg' was neuter, the preceding word often
ended in -o, which would have generated a [v]-like transitional sound
that may have been generalized later on. However, an imaginary
opponent might rightly object, the 'apple' word was neuter, too, so
what is the difference?
In my view the difference was accentological. The 'egg' word is
mobile, whereas the 'apple' word (and also, say, the 'lamb' word) are
stem-stressed. As a consequence you got on the one hand [the
accentual sign merely indicates the place of the stress]:
*tò aje 'that egg', with the stress on _to_ because both _to_ and
*aje are mobile and the NAsg of the neuter o-stems is what the
Russians call an enclinomenon.
and on the other:
*to àblko 'that apple', *to àgneN 'that lamb'.
The labial element can't have failed to be more salient in the former
type of case, where it was the rounded vowel that was stressed, than
in the latter. This may have tipped the balance in the dialectal area
continued by Czech and Slovak.
[I don't doubt that this is somewhere in the literature.]
Best,
Willem