Re: [tied] Ablaut and accent

----- Original Message -----
From: "Miguel Carrasquer" <mcv@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2003 10:50 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Ablaut and accent



> [Miguel:] Piotr, tell him how many syllables your first name has (in the nominative).

> [Glen:] Piotr, tell him why your name has no bearing on his crazy rule.

It isn't that crazy, and Miguel is not the first IEist to argue for it. I'm not going to play King Solomon, though. Here's just a brief excursus on syllable-counting, without taking sides.

/pjotr/ is monosyllabic to a native speaker of Polish; the final /r/ (a trill) keeps a low profile by usually getting devoiced. Many languages permit some hard-to-syllabify material to occur at the edges of phonological domains (ordinary spoken French behaves similarly to Polish or Russian in this respect).

The difference between Polish and Czech (rather closely related languages) is quite instructive. After the loss of weak yers Polish reduced the sonority of liquids flanked by consonants and thus prevented them from becoming syllabic -- which is precisely what Czech allowed them to become (except when initial, as in _monosyllabic_ <lkát> 'sob'). *krUvUe (the genitive of *kry 'blood') became Cz. krve (disyllabic with regular _initial_ stress in Modern Czech!) and OPol. krwie (Mod.Pol. krwi, monosyllabic). All the case forms of Cz. vlk 'wolf' (<vlka>, <vlci>, etc., have a stressed syllabic lateral, as in PIE *wl.kWos. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose :-)

Piotr