[tied] Re: No Slavic Accentology, Please!

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Willem Vermeer" <wrvermeer@...>
wrote:
On Saussure's law:

> This one really has to be seen to be believed. (Note again that

valencies are independent of

> length.) The stress is held to have moved to an internal syllable

only if the latter is _of the same

> valency_ as the originally stressed syllable. (For final syllables

de Saussure's formulation still

> holds, of course until further notice.) But don't take my word for

it, ça vaut le détour: Dybo, V.A.

> & Nikolaev, S.L., "Novye dannye i materialy po balto-slavjanskoj

akcentologii". In: Problemy

> slavjanskogo jazykoznanija: Tri doklada k XII Mez^dunarodnomu

s"ezdu slavistov, M., 1998, 5-

> 70, p. 54. Same text (nearly): Dybo, V.A., "Iz balto-slavjanskoj

akcentologii. Problema zakona

> Fortunatova i popravka k zakonu F. de Sossjura", Balto-slavjanskie

Issledovanija 1998-1999,

> 2000, 27-82, p. 75.

I'll try and dig up the references, thank you. Does this mean that
there are examples of potential acute vowels that fail to attract
the ictus from preceding non-acute in Lithuanian? Could you give an
example? It's not ran~komis, ran~kose again, is it?

>
> I'd written:
>
>
> > > Literally nobody outside Leiden accepts Kortlandt's glottalic

interpretation of it, yet I'm not familiar with even

> > a single systematic discussion. Given the virtual consensus one

would have expected several.

>
>
> And you wrote:
>
>
> > But what would there be to discuss systematically?
>
>
> The way it is embedded in a general conception of the development

of the phonological history

> of Balto-Slavic.
>
>
> > If (apart from aRD > a:RD) Winter's law works immediately before

the accent, then the Latvian tone would be the

> > glottal one anyway. Shintani said that.
>
>
> OK, but there are counterexamples, such as the 'nit' word.

I do not see what is surprising about glìnda (1), Latv. gni~da, Sl.
*gni"da (a). If there was a sequence *-ind- in it at some point,
that should produce *-i:nd- regardless of the position of the accent.

> > ... I for one find Il.-Sv.'s presentation ond the conclusions

drawn from it absolutely compelling. I consider his

> > oeuvre and his genius to be on the same level as Saussure's.

On Illich-Svitych:

> His observation that the
> Common Slavic transition of msc o-stems from (b) to (c) failed to

take place in the peripheral

> north-west of C^akavian (the phenomenon later called "(d)") is

exclusively built on palpably

> unreliable dialect descriptions coupled with ignorance of the

basics of SCr dialectology.

How much of it is wrong? I had got the impression that there were
indeed some errors of detail in the dialect descriptions, but that
the general message remained sound. Could you illustrate how wrong
this impression is?

Jens