Re: [tied] Syllabic liquids in Slavic

On Sun, 16 Sep 2001 19:28:49 +0200, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<gpiotr@...> wrote:

>>> The loss of palatality in Polish is neither sporadic nor arbitrary. It is governed by a set of rigorous phonetic conditions (for one example, see below). I can provide any amount of further details on demand.
>
>> Please do. We can start with <bez>, or <jeden>.
>
>These examples do not involve syllabic liquids.

I was referring to loss of palatalization in general.

>In early Polish palatality was irregularly lost (in the southern dialects) due to Czech influence

I doubt this is solely due to Czech influence. See below.

>(<wesele> 'joy', <serce> 'heart', <obywatel> 'citizen', <czerwony> 'red', etc. for earlier <wiesiele, sierce, obywaciel, czerwiony>);

I don't see how Czech <srdce> and <c^ervený> could have easily
influenced <serce> (<sirzce>) and <czerwony> (<czyrzwiony>), given
their rather different phonetical structure. Surely, <obywatel> may
very well be a Czech loan. [I see that Ban'kowski in fact gives it as
a "bohemizm", which he of course does not for <serce> or <bez>].

><bez> also belongs here (older <biez> survives in numerous placenames and old Polish personal names like Biezdrug, Biezuj, Biezdziad). The form <jeden> 'one' is of analogical origin (masc. *jedzien : fem. jedna [with regular dispalatalisation before *n] > jeden : jedna). As opposed to such quirks, the treatment of "syllabic liquids" is phonologically regular. It would take a lengthy posting, however, to explain the details. If you're interested, I'll give them in a separate message.

I'm interested. I would like to point out that in <serce> (< *k^r.d-)
[see above] the palatalization has been lost both on the /s/ and the
/r/: one might have had <sirzce> ~ <sierzce> [Bräuer: "Die Vertretung
<rz> statt <r> findet sich meist vor Labialen und Gutturalen, doch
kommen auch Abweichungen beiderseits vor"].

>In such cases the surviving yers yielded /e/ (*U) or palatality + /e/ (*I). But closed-syllable developments before liquids are _older_ than the change *& > e ~ zero in open syllables, and need not parallel it. /a/ for *& < *U (or dispalatalised *I) appears only before *r. So what?

The development of /r./ in Polish is not what would be expected for
/Ur/. It's possible to suppose an ad-hoc development /Ur/ > /er/? >
/ar/, so I retract my "impossible", but it's certainly not a necessary
development. To paraphrase you: "Of course in [..] individual
branches syllabic consonants came to be pronounced asynchronically as
[...]*-VR- or *-RV- combinations, but even so divergent *V values show
that this development is post-PSlav. E.g. syllabic *r happens to be
reflected as such in Czech, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian,
but otherwise gives ORussian Ir/Ur, OCS rI/rU, Bulg. r&/&r, Polish
ar/ier, Polabian or/ar, Sorbian ar/or/er, Slovenian dial. &r, ar, ro,
etc. It's far less trouble to derive all these reflexes directly from
syllabic *r than from anything like *&r." Even, I might add, if we
have to derive them from two distinct flavours of syllabic *r.