From: Andrei Markine
Message: 5577
Date: 2001-01-17
>There's a rather extreme Polish example involving the same root *jIm-That's really extreme! Thanks Piotr.
>'take'. The Slavic prefixed verb *vUz-jIm-ti 'take, take up' (Russian
>vz'at', Polish wzia,c') used to form the Polish imperative wez'mi(j) <
>*vUz-jIm-i (Russian voz'mi). This word, however, lost the final vowel and
>changed into wez'm, which was finally simplified, resulting in the modern
>imperative wez'. I doubt if any Pole who is not a linguist realises that
>wez' is an original prefix, not a verb root, and that the only trace of
>the original root is the palatalision of the final consonant -- this
>despite the fact that the prefix w(e)z- still exists in Polish!
>It so happens that the Polish reflex of *vy-jIm-ti 'take out' has notWhat is the most surprising is that while Polish keeps *vy-jIm-ti and
>suffered any mutilation and is still wyja,c', but we have played havoc
>with *Iz-jIm-ti 'take down (from), take off', where the preservation of
>nasality in Polish (<a,> with an underhook = nasalised [o~] or [oN])
>probably caused some articulatory discomfort and made expected *zn'a,c'
>(from *(I)zUn-jIm-ti with an intrusive nasal in the prefix) to give way to
>dissimilated zdja,c', hence such aberrant forms as imperative zdejm(ij)
>for historically expected *zen'm(ij).
>I vaguely remember coming across "snem" in some 12-13 c. Russian
>The Polish parlament is called Sejm (Gen. Sejmu, borrowed also into
>Lithuanian: Lietuvos Respublikos Seimas) from *sUn-jIm-U 'assembly' which
>should have produced *S'niem, Gen. *Sen'mu or the like. I suppose the
>non-Nom.sg. case forms were dissimilated (*sen'm- > *sejm-), whereupon the
>Nom.sg., which became the "odd man out", adopted the same stem form.