Re: [tied] Danube and Dnieper in Baltic and Slavic

-----Original Message-----
From: Piotr Gasiorowski [mailto:gpiotr@...]
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2001 1:20 AM
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [tied] Danube and Dnieper in Baltic and Slavic
 

>3 & 4) *da:nu- 'river; water (thus in Ossetic)' > Middle NE Iranian ("Sarmatian") *danu- (plus stress-bearing second elements, which were perhaps *is^ra- 'strong' and *afra- 'deep', respectively). 

 > Reczek speculates (rather plausibly, IMO) that pretonic *a in the Iranian dialect from which the Slavs borrowed these words was a reduced schwa-like vowel, and that the most natural Slavic substitute for it was *U.

 

There's no need to speculate on that - examples of [pretonic a] > Slavic /U/ are not uncommon in borrowings (cf. the example from one of my recent messages, East Baltic *Latga`la: > ORuss LUtIgala).

 

What I would like to see is a speculation on how /a/ in *afra- could yield Slavic /e^/. Two dialectal phonetic renderings are reconstructed for that phoneme in Late Common Slavic: [E] (long narrow e) and [AE] (long open e), both with optional onglides (some postulate this is somehow related to the phonetic differences between /e^1/ and /e^2/, one specific variant being generalized later across specific dialects). Even if we suppose [AE]-dialects to be the donor, we must postulate Middle NE Iranian stressed /a/ was 1. fronted 2. prolongated. Too many assumptions, IMO, to consider this plausible. Any ideas?

 

Sergei