Re: Balto-Slavic C-stems / long vowel endings

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> On 2007-01-22 22:21, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > Specifically: How can a stressed vowel become a jer? Jers are

ghosts

> > of departed (well, departing) vowels. Vanishing is what

*un*stressed

> > vowels do.
>
> Reduced is not necessarily the same thing as unstressed. There are

many

> Slavic words with no other vowels but jers (*pIsU 'dog',

*mUxU 'moss',

> *sUnU 'sleep, dream', *krUvI 'blood (acc.)', *dInI 'day' etc.). In

such

> cases one of the jers is reinforced phonologically, yielding a full
> vowel again. The quality of that vowel varies dialectally (cf. OCS

sUnU,

> Bulg. s&n [with a central shwa-type vowel!], SCr. san, Russ. son,
> Pol./Cz./Slk. sen) and it often disappears in inflected word-forms

and

> derivatives:
>
> *pIsU, gen. *pIsa > Pol. pies, psa
> *pIsUkU (dimin.), gen. *pIsUka > OPol. psek, pieska (> Mod.Pol.

piesek,

> pieska)
>
> Piotr
>

Not all yers became 'weak'. First they became lax (similar to English
vowels in 'big' and 'pull'). Later some of them shifted to e/o (cf.
the development of Latin short i and u) or schwa, which in some
languages subsequently yielded a.
The rest of them disappeared. Something similar happened in some
Croatian dialects, where the short i is frequently reduced or
dropped: vid (2sg imperative: look!) etc.
This probably has something to do with metrical properties of words
in PSl.

The stressed yer weren't 'weak' - they were ordinary lax vowels.

What I don't understand is how the word-final yers could disappear
even if they were stressed.