From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1790
Date: 2000-03-07
[Piotr:] 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.[Sergei:] 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.
As neither hypercorrection nor "jakanije" can account directly for Polish jantar, the implication seems to be that the Polish word was borrowed from Belarusian. To be sure, I can't see any clear examples of "jakanije" or "akanije" among the quite numerous Belarusian words borrowed into Polish (except, possibly, in czepigi/czapigi 'plough handles', but here BOTH variants exist).Don't you think that the Standard Russian form should be considered as borrowed (from Belarusian or a "jakajuščij" dialect, if not from Polish)? The putative hypercorrect form -- while not impossible -- would be an isolated specimen of its kind (unless you can cite some attested cases of je- > ja- through hypercorrection).
[Piotr:] 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.[Sergei:] 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.
Well, at least Latin was certainly used by some people in the region in the Middle Ages, and was the language of scholarship and diplomacy in most European countries. It served as the language of interethnic communication between educated people. The official communication between Poland and the Teutonic Order was conducted mostly in Latin. A technical term of Baltic origin could be Latinised (gintarus? gentarum?) and cross linguistic barriers quite easily, disguised as a learned Latin word.There was no universal pronunciation norm for Mediaeval School-Latin, but there WERE consistent regional standards. Students of Latin in central and eastern Europe generally followed the German model, in which palatalised c and g were pronounced [ts] and [j], so that e.g. Caesar's name was pronounced [tsezar] with an initial [ts] rather than [s] (as in the French and English tradition), or [tš] (as in Italy).The pronunciation of ge, gi as [ge, gi] made its debut during the Renaissance and was recommended by some German Humanist authorities; it continued to replace the older fashion in the centuries that followed, but the shift was not complete before the 18th century. The Polish spelling of nativised Latinate loans often substituted i/y/j for Latin or Greek g before front vowels: jeniusz 'genius', mayster 'master', loika 'logic', ewanielia 'gospel', jeometria etc. Note also the inverse Latin spelling Samogitia 'Žemajtija' with g for Lithuanian [j] (it was never meant to be pronounced [g]!). By the end of the 19th c. "neo-Classical" g [g] had been introduced in nearly all such words, and only a few traditional forms survive in present-day Polish (anioł 'angel', przywilej 'privilege'). The name Regina has the dialectal variant Rejna (< Reina). All this despite the fact that Polish /g/ has been a stop throughout the history of the language and that Polish never had any trouble assimilating ge, gi of non-Latinate origin (as in Lithuanian names like Gediminas or Algirdas > Polish Giedymin, Olgierd).Of course Latin was the language of the WESTERN Church and its enormous influence in Poland cannot be compared with that it had in the Orthodox countries, but I suppose Old Russian scribes and scholars, when confronted with Latin words, were quite happy with the central European orthoepic tendencies outlined above -- the more so because Greek g had also changed into [j] before front vowels. Like Polish, Modern Russian has accepted the traditional German value [ts] for c + {e,i} in Latinate loans (enciklopedija, specijal'nyj, etc.). The example you give (reina) was at the time the normal Polish pronunciation of the word (so I surmise from the reference to a Kievan princess, though you give no date). In pre-Renaissance times it wouldn't have occurred to anybody ANYWHERE, in the East or the West, to pronounce the word [regina], and even later, until quite recently, such a pronunciation was infrequent.My best regards,Piotr