Re: [tied] Vladimir

----- Original Message -----
From: "george knysh" <gknysh@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2003 11:04 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Vladimir



> > (1) The old forms are directly attested in the earliest documented Slavic names (Dargomir-, etc.),
>
> *****GK: Anything beside the (possibly misspelled) Bulgarian DARGAMEROS? We have a Prince DOROGOROG of the later 9th c. mentioned in the Cividale Gospel. He is assumed to have come on his pilgrimage from the Carpathians.******

<ardagastos> (= <radogostU>)
<baldimer> (= <volodime^r>, <vladimirU>, etc.)
<perslaban> (= <pereslavU>, <pre^slavU>, etc.)

> > and in the oldest Slavic loans e.g. into Romanian and Albanian.
>
> ******GK: How can these be securely dated? Perhaps some examples would help.*****

They can't be dated with , but they surely postdate the Slavic entry into the Balkans and predate the time by which the local Slavic dialects had undergone liquid metathesis. There are just a few such items indicative of early contacts, e.g. *dolto (< *dolb-to) 'chisel', cf. Alb. daltë, Rom. daltã. One might add Greek placenames of Slavic origin like Gardiki < *gordIkU, Gardenitsa < *gordInica, etc.

All later loans show metathesised combinations. Metathesis was the norm already in Cyril's OCS (though occasional older variants can be found in Church Slavic texts, e.g. <aldii> ~ <alUdii> for <ladii> 'boat'). It must have affected the southern periphery of the Slavic-speaking lands by the 830's, when young Cyril was learning the language. On the other hand, *korljI (from Gmc. karl-) was regularly changed everywhere (yielding <korol'>, <król>, <kralj>, OCS kral'I, etc.), so if we take Charlemagne's death (AD 814) as a rough terminus a quo for the borrowing, the first decades of the ninth century can be viewed as the time when metathesis and East Slavic pleophony were active processes.

> > (2) Unmetathesised forms like <gard> survive marginally in some dialects, e.g. in Kashubian.
>
> ******GK: I am reminded of the Polabian STARGARD. Could this be indicative of a direct Baltic Norse influence?*****

How would that influence have affected purely Slavic items like <darg> 'dear', <smard> 'stench', <sarka> 'magpie' or <varna> 'crow'? And what about unmetathesised sequences in Old and Middle Bulgarian dialects, far from Norse influence?

> > (3) The assumed Proto-Slavic forms correspond to cognate words in Baltic and elsewhere, e.g. Lith. bérz^as, Germanic *berkjo: vs. Russian bereza, Pol. brzoza, etc. (PSl. *berza reconciles them).
>
> ******GK: I can see that this is arguable. Would it also be arguable that a *b'rza (where ' is a very weak vowel) would also do the trick? Strengthened in some languages, and further weakened in others?*****

I don't think so, since there is comparative Slavic and Balto-Slavic evidence forcing us to assume that *Ir ~ Ur or *Il ~ *Ul (with weak *I or *U before the liquid) was the Proto-Slavic realisation of former syllabic *[r.] or *[l.]. Besides, pre-Slavic *er, etc. is independently demanded by extra-Slavic cognates. Since the modern forms (<ere>, <re>, <re^>) are rather easily derivable from *er and nothing forces us to complicate the derivation in a way that would have made Ockham reach for his razor, Proto-Slavic *er continuing earlier *er remains the most parsimonious solution.

> > (4) Early loans into Slavic show the same change, e.g. *walx- > volox/vlox/vlax (to cite Alex's favourite word), or Alb- > Laba, among many others.
>
> ******GK: *walx- would thus have existed as a "Slavic" term for some time ( with the accompanying *wolx ?)before the metathesis in So/West Sl and "lengthening" in EaSl ? Yet as a "borrowed" word, it need not be compared to the suggested *gr- *ml- and *vl- forms.******

A short digression is in order here: Proto-Slavic had vowels transcribed as *o (historically a short vowel, reflecting PIE *o or *a) and *a (from long *o: and *a:). Any early Germanic word with short *a was borrowed into Slavic with short *o. The conventional transcription fails to make it explicit that the earliest pronunciation of Proto-Slavic *o was actually [a]-like (contrasting with *a = long [a:]). The pronunciation [o] belongs to the "dialectal" period of Common Slavic. The words that we write *gordU, *volxU were in all likelihood pronounced [gardU], [walxU].

Now to the point. Anything borrowed before the end of Common Slavic would have been integrated into the Slavic lexical stock and treated like a native word with respect to all later changes affecting the individual languages. In other words, a borrowing into Proto-Slavic _is_ a Proto-Slavic word and behaves accordingly, no matter what its ultimate origin. *volxU is not an isolated case: we have Gmc. *xelma- 'helmet' --> PSl. *s^elmU as opposed to *hulma- 'hill' --> PSl. *xUlmU, both developing just like any similar words of native origin, undergoing all the changes expected of them. Any geographical names encountered by the Slavs before the metathetic changes were treated likewise, e.g. Arba, Albo:na, Scardo:na, Alb --> Rab, Labin, Skradin. Similar examples could be multiplied.

> > (5) Vowelless syllables with syllabic *[l.], *[r.] also existed but developed differently in Slavic. Cf. PIE *wl.kWos > Russ. volk, Polish wilk, Czech vlk, OCS vlUkU, SCr. vuk.
>
> ******GK: I'm not sure this indicates anything one way or another.******

They developed into Proto-Balto-Slavic *iR ~ *uR (R = *r or *l) > Proto-Slavic *IR ~ *UR (see above under (3)) with strongly reduced "yers" (in some dialects the combinations yielded real syllabic liquids). This means that you can't reconstruct the immediate ancestor of <gorod> as *gr.d or *gUrd. These slots are already taken (cf. gorlo < *g[U]rdlo).

Slavic metatheses and related problems have been discussed on Cybalist before. You can find the relevant postings in the list archive.

Piotr