On 2006-09-10 22:36, pielewe wrote:
> I'm not aware of a thorough and methodologically well-founded
discussion of the problem of the reflexes of word-final *os and
related sequences (*om etc.). When I was working on it fifteen years
ago in the context of the Novgorod/Pskov problem I was astonished by
the way much of the evidence is just ignored by most scholars (the way
I've never heard about the Zinkevic^ius argument until today) and also
by the way nearly everybody ignores nearly everybody else's work,
basically causing the subject to run around in circles like a young
dog trying to catch its own tail, and at best to reinvent itself
constantly.
Is the current state of things things really so bad? I think the main
arguments for and against either view are rather well known to all the
interested parties and the lack of consensus results simply from the
hard-to-resolve internal conflict in the evidence. Speaking for
myself, I find it more economic to accept *-os > *-ah > *-u(h) > -U,
which accounts not only for the nom.sg. of thematic masculines but
also for the 1sg. pres. and dat.pl. *-mU, and fits the general pattern
of back-vowel raising before the reflex of final *-s. The nom.sg. *-o
of es-neuters _can_ be explained as analogical (pace Kortlandt), and
the masc. nom.sg. in *-o- before enclitics (as in OCS narodotU, OCz.
vec^eros, etc.) may be due to pre-clitic dissimilatory loss --
something like *-os#tos > *-ah#tah > *-a#tah > *-a#tuh > -otU. If the
nom.sg. *-U had been borrowed from u-stems and generalised so
thoroughly, why should the *-o- of <narodo-tU> etc. have survived at all?
Piotr