> 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.
Piotr,
Yes, I know what you mean under the Yers, since I am proficient
in both Bulgarian and Russian. I write in Cyrillic. However, my
feeling about Russian (synchron) has been more (if I have
gotten you right) like telling me there are no Yers or what
corresponds to "tvjerdyj znak" in Russian at the end of the word
(they have disappeared?), while I have always felt like the
"mjagkij znak" belongs to the particular stem or to the ending of
the word in question, making it either "soft" or "hard". Of course, I
have looked at the languages only synchronically by now and
this may be influencing my whole idea of the thing. What usually
disturbs me is that in producing protoslavic reconstructs,
scientists often end up repeating the OCS form. I assume this
should happen only accidentally, so I consider it could be
placing the theory on the wrong grounds. Therefore my
question.
>
> 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.).
Yes, this would be logical.
The reason
> why final *-I and *-U were lost in Slavic is clear: word-final weak
vowels
> are universally prone to loss.
My questions would be if we should be assuming the existence
of this U in protoslavic. All church languages that you are
naming are later versions of OCS, I assume with developments
specific to the languages in question. Yet it would also be
logical to assume OCS could have been influenced by the
language spoken in Bulgaria at the time (from where the first
OCS texts and the adapted Cyrillic font stem, correct me if I am
wrong). Bulgarian is, even today, not purely Slavic, so it is
correctly said that OCS should not be taken as a preform of the
Slavic languages. How so then do the reconstructed forms
almost always coincide with it? The explanation I usually get is
that OCS is the oldest form of a written Slavic language that we
dispose of. Quite right. It is, however, not quite certain to me if
this form should always be taken as being also the slavic proto-
form.
I would personally be interested to see if OCS could also show
some features of the language of the Old Bulgarians. The
historical and political realities allow for the assumption that the
first more intensive slavization of the language in Bulgaria must
have taken place after Boris I (through OCS), and pushed further
especially after the Ottoman occupation and the following
liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottomans (also falsely called
Turks). In this period of about 5 hundred years many of the OCS
texts were saved in Russia, so any further change must have
gone in the direction from Russia towards Bulgaria. That is to
say, a connection of the sort OSC->Old Russian->modern
Bulgarian (plus the modern Bulgarian church language which,
as far as I know, has been modified to resemble Old Russian -
but I may be lying to you on this point).
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.
From a historical perspective, anything that concerns the "Slavic"
languages of the Balkans should be taken with some additional
doubt as to everything in them being Slavic. You have huuuge
other influences coming from at least a few directions: Old
Bulgarians (Iranian), the Byzantines (Greek), the Ottomans
(Turkish). The influences, of course, are to be understood also
chronologically. The Turkish words in all Balkan languages are
their newest loans - you will find none of them in OCS. Or so it
seems logical to me.
Eva