Re: [tied] The Wizard of **-oz

On Thu, 23 Nov 2000 22:27:57 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<gpiotr@...> wrote:

>The "null hypothesis" is the most parsimonious one. If morphological conditioning accounts for the observed facts, why introduce exotic phonemes praeter necessitatem?

Because we _need_ it in any case to explain the *o in the nom.sg.
*-os.

>It's not unusual for the same phoneme to develop differently in grammatical morphemes and in lexical stems.

I know. In Dutch, nominal and verbal plural and verbal infinitive
<-en> > /-@/, while an <-en> that belongs to the root remains as /-@.../
e.g. <regen> "rain". It's not unusual, but it's not necessary either.

>In none of these cases would it make sense to postulate two original phonemes rather than phonological changes sensitive to the morphological environment. My claim is that the case of *-os in Slavic is as clearcut as any of these English examples. Baltic has -as in masculines and there's little doubt that the Balto-Slavic ending was just that. Then something happened in pre-Slavic: most likely, in my opinion, the falling together of *-a (< *-as < *-os) and *-u (< *-ux < *-us) in the Nom.sg. (after the change *-aN > *uN both paradigms had the same Acc. endings).

The u-stems were responsible? Naah. I know the havoc they've caused
in Polish, but I don't think we had any of this in pre-Slavic, or we
wouldn't have had any distinct u-stems at all.

I think in the above you mean *-a (< *-ax < *-os) [like *-u (< *-ux <
*-us)], with development of final *-s to *-x. Something like this
(the presence of a "breathing" after the vowel) must have caused the
phonetic development of PIE *o (PS *a, probably a very back /A/ or
/O/) to /u/. Cf. for the influence of *-s the o-stem dat.sg. *-o:i >
Slav. -u, vs. ins.pl. *-o:is > Slav. -y [1]). But this didn't happen
in the s-stems, which is why I think the sibilant remained there
longer as a sibilant. Either because the sibilant itself was
different (my proposal), or because of the analogical weight of the
*-s- in the oblique cases (another possible view). In any case, I
can't see the development of o-stem nom.sg. *-os > *-u as anything but
a regular phonological development, as it was in Latin. No u-stems,
no analogy can explain it. Compare also forms like dat.pl. -mU <
*-mos / *-bhos / *bhi-os [yet another sibilant (*sw) in my proposals,
and indeed -mus even in Baltic (Old Lith.)].

[1] Another development for which I've seen no good proposal yet. The
best I can do is to postulate a (marginal) Proto-Slavic phoneme /uo/,
/u@/, parallel to *e^, yat', which I believe to have been a falling
diphthong /ie/, /i@/, i.e. *-o:i > *-uo/*u@, *-o:is > *-uox/*-u@:.
The lengthening and backing effect of the *-x caused the latter form
to merge early with *u: > y, while the former remained independent
long enough to merge with new /u/ from *ou (*au).

>This happened only in inflections, not in syllables that belonged to stems, which is why *slawa(s) 'word' or *neba(s) 'heaven' were not affected.
>
>Nom. Acc.
>
>*-i : *-i in i-stems
>*-u : *-u in u-stems
>*-a : *-u in thematic masculines --> *-u : *-u
>
>As in English (Example 1), one could expect some thematic masculines to retain the original ending in fossilised combinations, e.g. with an enclitic. This is precisely what we find in OCS: rodosI '(this) family', rabotU '(that) servant' < *rada-si, *arba-tu.

But these are vocalized yers, as in OCS <otecI>!

>I wonder if there were enough Slavic s-neuters to account for the generalisation of -o (< pre-Slavic *-a) in thematic neuters (there are about 20 examples, and not all of them equally good). The influence of *tod remains a serious possibility.

Yes. The more I think about it, the more I think this must be the
right solution.

>At a certain point, after the loss of final consonants, pre-Slavic had *ta 'it, that (n.)' beside neuters like *slawa 'word' and *si:tu 'sieve'. Compare the following:
>
>sg. pl.
>
>t-a si:t-u t-a: si:t-a:
>t-a slava- t-a: slawes-a:
>
>The replacement of *si:t-u by *si:t-a strengthened the formal symmetry between pronouns and thematic nouns (already established for masculines and feminines!), but not between thematics and s-neuters (which retained their *-es- before all case endings). It appears, therefore, that the influence of the demonstrative pronoun was crucial in this process.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...