Re: [tied] az+

09-07-03 18:17, fortuna11111 wrote:

> You probably know better than me
> that all church Slavonic languages were adjusted to common languages
> in the course of time. Quite logical, if the original was based on
> one single regional dialect.

But Sergei and I were _not_ speaking about "church" Slavic. For example,
Krivichian, which had <jazU>, shows no Church Slavic influence
whatsoever. Such influence was minimal in the case of Old Polish and
zero in the case of Polabian.

> The question remains why modern Slavic languages do not have the same
> pronoun in 1. pers. singular (and in 3rd person sing. and plural), why
> they do not have articles; why the case system has been preserved in
> them, why they show so many simply phonetic deviations from Bulgarian
> and OCS (which includes the developments /sht/, /zhd/), shall I
> mention the infinitive, which was also lost for some reason not only
> in Bulgarian, but also in other Balkan languages. I will not
> attribute this just to coincidence and internal development of Slavic
> languages. At least for now, I don't find such an argument convincing.

The reasons are the same as those responsible for differentiation within
_any_ genetic grouping of languages (Germanic, Iranian, Celtic,
whatever). Contact with different non-Slavic languages is only part of
the explanation. You can't say that the Slavic languages have "deviated
from Bulgarian and OCS". They have deviated from their common ancestor
(Proto-Slavic), and so has Bulgarian. For example, <s^t> is just one of
several possible developments of the PSl cluster *tj or of *kt followed
by *i. The West Slavic reflex is <c> (i.e. the affricate [ts]), East
Slavic has <s^c^>, OCS and Bulgarian have <s^t>, Serbo-Croatian has <c'>
[ts'], and Slovene has <c^>. No language has preserved the original
sequences.

Piotr