Hi Piotr,
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).
Bulgarian Orhography began to omit it some time in the 20th century.
I know about this. Yet was what you call Russian orthography not
under the influence of OCS? Or do you have other, independent
written sources confirming the existence of those Yers in the actual
language of Russians? Did Russians have a written language at all,
before OSC?
> 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.
Yes, exactly. I don't think I meant anything different.
> 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,
Would you give me a source on this?
I also think it is difficult to appreciate evidence given by
languages, if you don't know those languages in depth (e.g.
Bulgarian). And in any historical analysis, you have to start from
synchronic analysis anyway.
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.
I think we have a problem with notation here, since what I am marking
down as U a vowel that is very common to modern Bulgarian. It was
very common in final position after consonant, but it is also a very
common vowel which gives a reflect e, o or something else in other
Slavic languages. Russ. put', Bulgarian pUt, russ. grek, bulg. grUc,
russ. son, bulg. sUn, russ. bolgar, bulg. bUlgarin, etc. I have not
met a person speaking a Slavic language who has not found this U very
foreign phonetically. You do have it all over the place in OCS, but
a Russian simply cannot say it (I have the same experience with
Poles). Note that I have grown up meeting too many Russians for
reasons I will not explain now.
>
> > 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.
Piotr, being Slavic and being influenced by another language are two
different things. I am not looking for a credo, just looking at the
facts. Bulgarian is very Slavic without half of its grammar and some
significant part of its vocabulary.
> 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.
Exactly. Like building definite forms of the kind *dobrijU that
happen to be explained through some funny definite article, which
should have been present in the Slavic protolanguage and then
mysteriously disappeared in all Slavic languages, but Bulgarian. Can
you tell me of another language that has developed an article and
then dropped it? Just curious. Meillet had an idea about those
articles. He suddenly poited at the Iranian languages and said there
were parallels of such articles there as well (I can give you a
source on this). But I guess it is much easier to assume the
difinite forms were present in the protolanguage an then dropped than
to assume that they simply never existed. Slavic forms look ancient
enough and similar enough to the PIE forms. Another similarity would
be just okay - like simply never having to develop an article.
> > ... 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.
This is a theory that is at least 15 years old and you will probably
still read it in encyclopaedias 100 years from now. The
Protobulgarian inscriptions, discovered in the 30's and 40's and
thrown by the Commies in the political cellar, could not be
translated with the help of all the Turkic languages on earth. They
were translated about 10 years ago by a Bulgarian historian who used
parallels from various eastern Iranian Languages. Since then it is
generally the convention among scholars in Bulgaria that Bulgarians
were Iranian, period. Anyone claiming something different should
manage to translate the inscriptions using Turkic - I may then be
convinced of the opposite.
Vassil Karloukovski has compiled a list of the Old Bulgarian words
still found in the modern Bulgarian language with their possible
parallels
http://members.tripod.com/~Groznijat/b_lang/bl_a_v.html
There you will also find comments by a Turkologist from Yale
university (Cluster User) who participated in a discussion on the
subject long ago. Judge for yourself on the convincing power (and
the relative number) of those Turkic parallels. The list does not
claim to be exhaustive and is subject to further study, of course.
For example, here is an example that just occurred to me:
skr. tr.na "grass", bulg. trUn "thorn"
(a dropping of the r-sonance very similar to *r. >av. UrU)
the stem *tr.s that gave Durst in German could also be connected
with bulg. tUrsja "suchen"
How about the OCS azU- enigma (the word for "I"). You have the word
listed with a predominance of question marks on all explanatory notes
in Pokorny. Obviously, it is not very clear how the "I" ended up in
this form in OCS. The thing becomes very clear if you compare with
av. azUm, for example.
bulg. azbuka "alphabet", a compiled word from the names of the first
two letters in Glagolic: azU, buki. The next two letters were called
vedi, glagoli. Buki is still a mystery even to me. Vedi looks like
more than clear. I will write something on glagoli the next time I
get to a pc. I don't have it all in my mind.
.. and so on with the examples.
Here is a list of the words, preserved in the historical and
archaeological monuments from the VI-X cc. AD, also with comments
from the same Turkologist:
http://members.tripod.com/~Groznijat/b_lang/bl_oldwords.html
You will find a full list of the inscriptions in Beshevliev's
book "Protobulgarian Inscriptions". A reading of the iscriptions is
given by the historian Petar Dobrev (Here is an English translation
of some of his writings
http://members.tripod.com/~Groznijat/pb_lang/index.html)
Generally, the question should no longer be if Bulgarians were
Iranian. The question is what Iranian language they spoke exactly.
If we get to answer this question, we may also help the Slavistics
get rid of some... definite articles for example.
And since this discussion may slip into
history/politology/culturology beside liguistics, I suggest that all
further questions and comments be sent to me in personal emails. I
really have very little time lately and I may just miss some replies,
if they don't end up in my mailbox (I am reading the list form the
website).
Eva