Re: grad-hrad

----- Original Message -----

From: Gene Kalutskiy

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Friday, December 31, 1999 6:01 AM

Subject: [cybalist] Re: grad-hrad

Gene wrote: >>>Oh, and I wouldn't really call it a "consonant shift", cause it's nothing like the Germanic consonant shift<<< Marc replied: >>>I think g>gh>h is +-comparable to the Germanic consonant shift (parallel softening of p>f, t>th, k>h)<<< Gene: What I meant to say above is that it was nothing on the _scale_ of the germanic consonant shift, it's much more trivial. And I'm pretty sure this g>gh>h shift happened not too long ago, probably some time during the 1st millenium AD. It isn' really comparable to Grimm's Law, as it only affected one phoneme -- a shift is a systemic change. In the "hrad" languages the voiced velar stop must have changed into a voiced fricative first (a common type of lenition a.k.a. "weakening"), and then the articulation of the fricative became further weakened by losing its "oral constriction" component. The pronunciation I'm familiar with can be described as a partially voiced glottal fricative -- the kind of sound that may result from the intervocalic voicing of English /h/ in behind or perhaps. It's not a plain aspirate. Some Poles use this sound in the spelling-pronunciation of loanwords (also from Czech or Ukrainian) spelt with h, as opposed to the sound /x/ (= German or Scots ch) used when the spelling is ch. Most Poles, however, use /x/ in both cases, and the historical stop *g remains /g/ in Polish.   The fricative pronunciation is an areal innovation which spread when the ancestor of the modern Slavic languages were already spoken more or less in their present locations. This is why its range cuts across "genetic" boundaries. It must also be borne in mind that the traditional division of Slavic into three subbranches has more to do with various secondary regroupings and new areal configurations (especially after the Magyar conquest of Pannonia) than with the earliest splits; you should not imagine than Proto-Slavic split neatly into the Proto-Eastern, Proto-Western and Proto-Southern languages. The Eastern "subbranch" is more valid, genetically speaking, than the other two, but areal influence has always been powerful throughout the Slavic world. In the Western Ukraine Polish and Ukrainian coexisted for many centuries and bilingualism was very common especially among the Polonised gentry of the area. The mutual influence of both languages has produced a considerable degree of non-genetic similarity or convergence. I sometimes find extremely non-standard varieties of Polish harder to understand than standard Ukrainian. Still, my knowledge of Russian is quite good, which certainly makes any form of East Slavic more familiar to me.