Re: [tied] Yers

----- Original Message -----
From: fortuna11111
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2003 4:22 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Yers



> 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?),

Russian orthography began to omit it just about a hunderd years ago. Of
course it was only an orthographic shadow of a once real vowel. The yers
were phonetically dropped in most of East Slavic about the 12th century (a
bit later than that in northern Russia).

> 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.

Synchronic palatality (or lack thereof) is a modern reflex of the lost
vowel, just as umlaut in Germanic languages reflects a lost *-i- (PGmc.
*mu:siz > OEng. my:s > MEng. [mi:s] > mice [maIs]). Synchronic alternations
result from past sound changes.

> 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.

No serious scholar would confuse OCS with Proto-Slavic. Hence my asterisks
if I cite reconstructed forms.

> 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.

Even if OCS had never existed, we'd have to reconstruct final years on
comparative grounds. It's difficult to appreciate the weight of the evidence
if you haven't studied Slavic and Indo-European historical linguistics, but
the very fact that Slavic orthographic yers correspond consistently to real
vowels outside Slavic is significant. Internal yers are even more tangible
than final ones, since not all of them have disappeared. In Bulgarian, for
example, *U > & (schwa) and *I > e in many positions.

> 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,

Believe me, it's as Slavic as any other Slavic language. English remains
Germanic despite having undergone massive relexification.

> so it is correctly said that OCS should not be taken as a preform of the
Slavic languages.

It isn't -- except, perhaps, by some amateurs. By the same token, Gothic is
not Proto-Germanic and Gaulish is not Proto-Celtic.

> 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.

Again, I can't imagine a good linguist making such a gross mistake. OCS was
chronologically rather close to Proto-Slavic and preserved many archaic
features, but it also showed a number of important innovations. Some OCS
words are practically identical with Proto-Slavic reconstructions (but not
because the latter are dependent on OCS -- it just so happens), but many
others aren't.

> ... You have huuuge other influences coming from at least a few
directions: Old Bulgarians (Iranian), ...

They were not Iranian. They were linguistically Turkic, speaking a language
related to modern Chuvash.

Piotr