On Monday, December 29, 2003, at 12:42 PM, Mate Kapović
wrote:
> Old Russian has consistently the spelling korocˇun7
> with both -o- and not -ora- so this is also maybe proof
> against Piotr's theory.
Do you altogether exclude for OR the possibility
of breaking up the kr- cluster by introducing a
vowel in order to get something that might've been
more agreeable to East Slavs 800-1000 years ago?
Although, such clusters are typical to all IE idioms,
in some of them some clusters are... bothering, and
people tend to apply various solutions in order to
get variants of a word that are perceived as pleasant.
(In this respect, just compare Romance and Germanic
languages with Slavic languages.)
Language transforms pursuant to the... whims of the
user (much to the grief of normative grammarians and
of stylists). People always speak as their... "beak
has grown" on them (to approximately cite Martin
Luther, who paid heed to this principle when he
translated the Bible into German). If it weren't so,
then there would be no dialects and, today, we'd
still speak the "Ursprache" PIE, or variants thereof
only slightly different from the one which was spoken
in Kurdistan 5 millennia ago. :^)
> Mate
George