Re: Odp: Gender of the sun

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

From: Sergejus Tarasovas

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2000 11:08 AM

Subject: [cybalist] Re: Gender of the sun

Sergei wrote:

It's not my intention to turn this venerable IE discussion into discussion
on the Russian languauge but (sorry :)
still dare note that
1. we DO have this dolog in Russian (put' dolog, I have to look through
Dal's dictionary for other examples)
...

---

 

Dear Sergei,

 

Touché! Excuse my ignorance and thanks for patching an embarrassing gap in my Russian competence. I think discussing Russian is all right as long as it's relevant to IE in general. What we are exploring is -- among other things -- the (possibly underestimated) value of Russian forms as evidence for Proto-Slavic vowel quantity and pitch accent, and less directly for the distribution of PIE laryngeals.

 

As for dolog, one could make a last-ditch attempt to argue that it is of analogical origin. The source of the analogy would be adjectives with the suffix *-Uk-, i.e. containing a genuine "organic" yer. The proportional equation would be like this:

 

uzk-ij : uzok 'narrow' = korotk-ij : korotok 'short' = dolg-ij : X 'long'

Solution: X = dolog

 

But since dolog and posolon' support each other, as it were, I'm inclined to think that you may be right and that the nice minimal pair dolg 'duty, debt' : dolog 'long' illustrates the contrastive treatment of *{i, u}R and *{i:, u:}R (or, to refer to a later stage, circumflexed and acuted nuclei) in Russian. The early reflexes of the *{i:, u:}R set would apparently have to be reconstructed as pleophonic UlU > olU and IrI > erI, resulting in alternations like dolog : dolg-o. I can't remember seeing such a reconstruction mentioned in the literature, but then I'm not a Slavicist and there must be many other things I haven't seen.

 

The contrast po-solon' 'following the sun' : solnce 'sun' suggests that the difference between historically short and long vowels was neutralised before the suffix *-iko > -(I)ce, apparently because the medial yer made the old acute intonation change into a neocircumflex; otherwise we'd get *solonce. Similarly, *si:rd-iko 'heart' (from PIE *krd- > *Cird- > *Ci:rd- with Winterian lengthening before *d) yields Russian serdce, not *seredce.

 

To be sure, we have the unexpected Russian zolovka 'sister-in-law' (< *zu:lw-), not *zolvka, but this form can't be very old. It's based on zolva, a word attested in Russian dialects (I suppose the Gen. pl. would be zolov) as well as elsewhere in Slavic (note in particular Slovene zo^lva and Serbo-Croatian za"ova (with pitch accents that point to Proto-Slavic *zu:lw-a:, itself derived from an old athematic feminine, PIE *g(e)lo:u-s, perhaps = *glH(o)u-).

 

Hope that all this stuff makes some kind of sense.

 

Piotr