Re: Odp: Odp: Odp: IE Lithuanian-Mediterranean connections

I asked for timeout, but your ideas seemed so interesting that my curiosity just forces me to ask you some questions.

-----Original Message-----
From: Piotr Gasiorowski [mailto:gpiotr@...]
Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2000 8:57 PM
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Odp: Odp: Odp: IE Lithuanian-Mediterranean connections

True enough (function words like jest' don't undergo the change either, though concrete nouns normally do), but what you NEVER find among such words is back-mutation giving ja rather than jo; and while we have jantar- in both Russian and Polish, *jontar- is completely non-existent.

Ja- in todays Russian orthogramme can easily be explained as a late hypercorrection, as unstressed jo, ja, ji and je were reflexed as jь (as it's rendered in standard Russian phonetical transcription), not to mention so called 'yakayushchiye' (ya-saying) dialects (the western ones, and the same we have in Byelorussian - not very far from Poland!), where the reflex is certainly ja.

The replacement of ge, ke by je, ce [tse] in Slavic has more to do with the traditional Mediaeval pronunciation of Latin and Greek loans than with Slavic phonotactics. Quite certainly "ge > je" has no basis in the normal phonological developments in either Polish or Russian. In non-Graeco-Latin loans (such as those involving the Germanic prefix ge-) I'd expect the simpler and more natural replacement of ge, gi by gU, gy.

For Lithuanian gint- to become Slavic jVnt- the word would therefore have had to be regarded as Latinate. And perhaps it was! Here's my hypothetical scenario for Polish: gintaras > quasi-Latin (learned) *gintarus or *gentarus > Polonised *jętar (ę = eN, i.e. nasalised [e]) > dialectal jaNtar (with a nasalised [a])> Modern (regional or literary) Polish jantar. The Modern Russian word may owe its form to the influence of Polish, but Old Russian jen(U)tar' could be an independent attempt to assimilate Latinate *gi/entarus. Note that in this narrative your postulated jen(U)tar(I) is no longer aberrant and may be accepted at face value!

What I can't check at the moment is whether amber is actually called *gintarus/*gentarus in any Mediaeval Latin texts. If it were, this would be clinching evidence for my proposal.

To be sincere, Latin as a mediator seemes as unnatural to me as that Indo-Aryan origin to you. But the question is: pronunciation, traditional in what country? I've never heard about any consistency in oral rendering of Latin texts in the Middle Ages (as well as today), and wonder how the pronunciation used by Old Russian scribes can be recovered.

As for Greek, j can be explained by the fact that by that time g had already changed to fricative (if I'm not mistaken), but as for Latin, Kiev's princess in France signed as реина (reina), as fricative г (g) of her own language seemed to her unappropriate to render the velar stop in Latine regina.

Sergei.