Serguej,
> What do you mean exactly? The only unique feature about Standard
> Bulgarian _az_ 'I' is its lack of the j-prothesis (the dialects also
> have _jáze_, _ja_, _jes_)
Dialects have it rarely, if you look at it closely. Even I joke
sometimes and I say "jaze che ti kazhem". Very often, it would turn
out in producing such a sentence I am speaking several dialects
simultaneously. Just ramdom compilations of what I have heard
somewhere, somehow. And that's excatly my point: when speaking,
people don't think about linguistic transformations or about how to
help the linguists explain something. They just combine, probably
following some implicit psychological patterns which already have very
little to do with the usual sterile logic of pure linguistics.
, but this is characteristic of (Standard)
> Bulgarian inherited words in general (cf. Bulg. _ágne_ 'lamb' vs.
> Mac. _jagne_, SCr. _ja"gne_ etc).
I have to see how this is interpreted by Bulgarian dialectologists.
Yet I think it may have to do with the typical hardness and uniformity
of vowels in Bulgarian. It is an old enough phenomenon and still very
lively in modern Bulgarian.
Btw, Serguey, I was interested how the reflexes of the OCS "jatova
glasna" (which is resolved as /ja/ or /e/ in Bulgarian, depending on
the position and stress) are considered in Russian? (I mean words
like bulg.sg.m. bjal "white", plural beli, vs. russ. belyj) No such
changing pattern seems to exist in modern Russian. The e/ja in
Bulgarian is either /e/ or /ja/ in the whole corresponding paradigm in
Russian. The corresponding vowel in Polish seems to be /ja/ in all
paradigms. I have no idea what this means.
Is _that_ what you are inclined to
> explain via Iranian influence?
The /ja/ as being derived from an azU, does not sound convincing to
me. People do tend to say the "z", e.g. say rather "jaze" than "ja"
in dialects. And even if this is discarded as unconvincing, I am
against the belief that a language becomes "conquered" by another and
leaves no traces in the grammar and vocabulary that comes as a result.
I do not think human communication is so limited in the connections
it is able to establish.
I can understand that in linguistics you will always look for a
logical pattern applicable everywhere. I also understand the reasons
for this. Yet, what one of my professors here says, languages
sometimes do strange things. The strange things probably also have a
pattern, just as the exceptions in English, if you have the patience
to look into them. Then you may end up discovering a better logic
which is more sensitive to exceptions - incorporating them and not
kicking them out. If you want to call this unscientific, note that
such ideas are now being applied in the most progressive fields of
computer science.
> OCS _azU_
> Macedonian _jas_
> Serbo-Croatian _jâ_, dial. j"az
> Slovenian _jàz_
> Czech _já_, Old Czech _jaz_
> Slovak _ja_
> Upper Sorbian _ja_
> Lower Sorbian _ja_
> Polabian _jo_, _joz_
> Polish _ja_, Old Polish _jaz_
> Slovincian _jå'u__
> Old Russian (both Standard Kievan and Krivichian) _jazU_, later _ja_
> Russian _ja_
> Ukrainian _ja_
> Belarusian _ja_
Okay, now look at just the modern languages (and be careful with the
Serbian dialects and Macedonian) and see what you come up with. That
was just an idea.
Eva