BSlav & IE accentology. To whom it may concern

From: Alexei Kassian
Message: 44982
Date: 2006-06-15

Dear colleagues,

1. The second part of Dybo's article posted above is in preparation.
As far as I know, prof. Dybo wasted a lot of time to finished the
first part: a lot of new data (Ancient Slavic or Baltic) had to be
incorporated in general reconstruction.
It is clear that prof. Lehfeldt didn't keep this work; Lehfeldt is
guided by the secondary literature, not by primary sources.
As usually, to give the good answer on the slightly indiscriminate
statements takes more time than to formulate these statements.

As for second part -- an answer to prof. Wermeer's Appendix -- the
situation is much more deteriorated.


2. The accentological discussion in this blog is really strange from
my point of view. There are a general conception of BSlav (& IE)
accentology now. I mean Dybo--Illich-Svitych's reconstruction.
This covers the main part of attested forms and systems of
accentuation in the local BSlav dialects.
The archaic labeles like "Meillet's law" etc are out of date.

3. I realise well, that it's really hard to read Dybo's or Serguei
Nokolaev's texts even if you are a native speaker of Russian.
I plane to translate all the works of "MAS" in English (please
forgive my poor English in advance).
At present we (with my coeditor of Studia Linguarum 3:
https://www.eisenbrauns.com/ECOM/_1TR1491K3.HTM ) translated into
English the Winter paper only.


4. Dear Miguel Carrasquer, you wrote about athematic and primary
thematic verbal stems in Slavic.

a) First, it is irrelevant for any accentological conception, since
the athematic group is too small: only 4 verbs ('esse', 'to eat', 'to
know', 'to give').
All these stems show the generalization of mobil ac. paradigm.

The same concerns primary thematic Slavic stems. Almost all of them
show mobil ac. paradigm.
It's clear secondary generalization, since we find relicts of
a.p. "a" and a.p. "b" in some Slav. dialects (see the Serguei
Nikolaev's papers).

b) IE reconstruction (your: *h1és-mi, *h1és-si, *h1és-ti, *h1s-més,
*h1s-tés, *h1s-énti) is impossible, since all IE l-ges (except for
BSlav) show the total generalization within ALL verbal types.
Thus (in particular) we know nothing about accent in IE athematic
stem.
Some approche was made in Nikolaev--Starostin's paper concerning two
accentual and morphonological classes of IE verbs (Balto-slav'anskie
issledovanija 1981. M., 1982), but this hypothesis requires
additional evidences.



Sincerely Alexei Kassian

P.S. Certainly I'l be glad to provide you with any papers of "MAS",
but it can take some time.