From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 22785
Date: 2003-06-06
----- Original Message -----
From: fortuna11111
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 9:54 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: ANUS
> Piotr, a question that I have been concerned with for a while now: How is
the disappearing in modern Slavic languages of this U in the end of the word
explained historically? I am wondering about the theoretical grounds behind
assuming such an U existed in the proto-language.
It's one of the pair of "ultra-short" (reduced) vowels /I/ and /U/ (called
"yers") that developed out of pre-Slavic short *i and *u. The yers developed
into full vowels in some contexts (the details are language-specific) and
were lost in others, including the word-final position. They were still real
segments in Old Bulgarian (Old Church Slavic) and Old Russian, so we need no
"theoretical grounds" to justify them. The Cyrillic script used special
letters to write them down explicitly.
The word-final -U in the nom.sg. of Slavic masculines usually reflects PIE
*-os (cf. Lithuanian -as, Greek -os, Latin -us, Skt. -ah., etc.). The reason
why final *-I and *-U were lost in Slavic is clear: word-final weak vowels
are universally prone to loss. The same has happened in countless other
languages including French and English (OE nama [nama] > ME name [nam&] >
[na:m] > ModE [neIm]). The yers were not dropped without trace. In Old
Polish, for example, their loss caused the compensatory lengthening of the
preceding syllable under certain conditions. It also had profound
consequences as regards the intonation system of languages such as
Serbo-Croatian or Slovene.
Piotr