Re: Odp: Introduction to PIE Stress

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1189
Date: 2000-01-27

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Simona Klemencic
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2000 8:26 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Introduction to PIE Stress

In his book Slavonic accentuation (1957) Chr. Stang argues that there must 
have existed mobile thematic nominal paradigms in PIE. He believes that the 
"de Saussure's law" explaining shift of accent from the second syllable from 
the end to the last syllable only operated in Baltic and that the Slavic 
a.p.c (=mobile) nominal paradigms cannot be explained with help of a single 
phonetical law. In his view the Slavic has inherited its mobile nominal 
accent paradigm from the PIE language. If I understood him well, his idea of 
the PIE mobility in thematic nouns and adjectives is that it must have been 
a holokinetic type (ictus either on the first or on the last syllable of the 
word). He finds a proof for this statement in a Greek relic orgyia (ictus on 
the 1st syllable) Gen orgyies (ictus on the long last syllable) and in 
Germanic in pairs like Gothic blotha- : Old Saxon blod or Gothic kasa- : Old 
Norse ker. He admits though that for the Germanic examples other 
explanations could be found, too.
What do you think about the possibility that a mobile (holokinetic) nominal 
thematic accent paradigm existed in PIE?

lp
Simona
A good question. There are a number of minor problems of this kind. I couldn't discuss them in what was supposed to be an introduction. Stang's Greek example doesn't really belong here. Such feminine stems were originally consonantal (laryngeal-final) and the fact that some of them remained mobile in Sanskrit and Greek is hardly surprising. Stang's reconstruction of the Proto-Slavic accentual system has been discussed and at least partly refuted by V. Dybo, V. M. Illich-Svitych, F. Kortlandt and others. Nowadays the type of mobility visible in Slavic tends to be regarded as branch-specific (that is, secondary) rather than inherited.
 
Germanic presents problems of its own. For example, Verner's Law consistently applies in the plural forms of es-neuters (another paradigm with immobilised root stress in Greek and Sanskrit): Old English lamb/N.pl. lambru (OHG lembir) < PGmc *lambaz/*lambizo: < *-os/*-esa:x. I wish I knew precisely what had happened here. At first glance the plural stem *lambiz- looks as if it were derived and generalised from a form with a stressed inflectional ending, but this paradigm was remodelled almost beyond recognition (through analogical levelling) already in PGmc, so that it's quite impossible to trace the history of individual forms. Whatever its origin, the alternation appears to be an inner Germanic affair.
 
On the whole I don't see much evidence for "holokinetic" thematics in PIE.
 
Piotr