Willem R. Vermeer ("The rise of the North
Russian dialect of Common Slavic", _Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics_ 8
[1986]) argues that the monophthongisation of the Proto-Slavic
diphthongs had not diffused to (Proto-)Krivichian before the
progressive/second regressive assimilation (regarded as one and the same change)
expanded to the Novgorod/Pskov area. Since *ai was still a diphthong with a
non-front first element, there was no input at all to the "second regressive"
part of the assimilation, hence its failure in Krivichian. The
"progressive" part resulted in a series of new palatals that
were restricted to stem-final positions and therefore marginal to the
system (Vermeer treats the Krivichian "c'okanje" as a
later innovation, not an archaism). As such, they were vulnerable to
analogical elimination. The one that normally survived was *c', which was
well entrenched in productive suffixes.
Vermeer's analysis is attractive.
The only inconsistency I can see in it is the non-occurrence of the
progressive assimilation after old *ai and *ei in Krivichian. If they had
preserved their final glide, it ought to have triggered the palatalisation. One
can propose (as Vermeer does) that the glide had been lowered and the
Proto-Krivichian reflexes of the diphthongs at the time of the palatalisation
were something like *ae, *ee., which may be a little ad hoc, though surely not
implausible.
I haven't got the original article to hand,
but I have a PDF copy of a more recen article by Vermeer (2000, from _Russian
Linguistics_ 24), which contains an exposition of his ideas. I am sending it to
you off-list.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2002 10:40 PM
Subject: [tied] A bit of Proto-Slavic relative
chronology
--- In cybalist@......, "Piotr
Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@......> wrote:
> If
you mean the change of *au > *u, *eu > *ju, and *u: > *y, the
dates
look plausible. Quite certainly some early loans from Germanic
were borrowed
before the completion of those changes. Another example
similar to *þiud- is
Goth. biud- --> Slavic *bljudo.
>
> Piotr
Sorry for the
slip -- I actually meant _con_traction, of course.
Another question I've
been concerning with is the (relative)
chronology of the 2nd and 3rd Slavic
palatalizations. A conservative
point of view, mostly based on relative
instability of the output of
the latter, attributed a later date to it, but
(North) Krivichian
doesn't demonstrate the 2nd palatalization at all, while
there's
nothing idiosyncratic as to the 3rd palatalization in it (_vIxU_
'all' instead of _vIsI_ being the only exception), and the results of
Sedov's excavations point to 450-500 as the date of the arrival of
Slavic tribes in the Pskov-Novgorod area (a second Slavic wave, dated
to
ca. 700, is attributed to the Ilmen Slovenes), which would mean
the 3rd
palatalization was over and the 2nd one hadn't yet started by
the middle of
the 5th century.
Sergei
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