--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "÷ÁÄÉÍ ðÏÎÁÒÑÄÏ×" <ponaryad@...>
wrote:
> PIE *-om usually develops into Slavic -U. Unexpectedly, Slavic
neutra of o-declension end in -o. As long as know, there were two
attempts to explain this feature.
>
> 1. Vyacheslav Ivanov supposes that in IE o-declension neutra
originally had zero ending, just as consonant stems do. Slavic -o is
the trace of this archaic feature (because phonetically it can
regularly reflect PIE *-o).
>
> 2. Another explanaition belongs to Frederik Kortland, who writes
that in Slavic the IE original *-om in neutra was replaced with -od
(from pronominal paradigms). Just the same we find in late Anatolian
languages, e.g. in Lydian.
>
> Nevertheless, neither explanation seems to me satisfactory.
Perhaps, it remains still better to assume that PIE *-om could give
Slav. *-o sometimes. As a reason for such a conclusion, we find
several examples where IE neutra seem to show the regular
development *-om > *-U, and therefore are tracted as masculines,
e.g. Slav. *darU (m.) vs. Gr. do:ron (n.) "gift". But why could *-om
give both *-U and *-o, I fail to understand.
>
> Does anybody has any idea on this subject?
Illich-Svitych explained this in what looks like a definitive
manner. The transfer of neuters to masculine only hit words with pre-
Slavic accent on the initial, cf. dá:rU : peró from *dóH3ro-m :
*pteró-m. Therefore the change of *-om to -U is apparently confined
to old unaccented position. Hirt had seen this already, but could
not integrate the type dvòrU, dvorá which in Slavic accents the
thematic vowel. The advent of what is now known as Dybo's Law
changed this: IE *dhwóro-m (Vedic dvá:ram) shifted the accent to the
second syllable (Dybo's Law: In Slavic the accent is moved from non-
acute vowels to the next syllables, except in mobile paradigms).
Before the operation of the accent shift unaccented *-om had already
changed, the result being an ending with an accented reduced vowel
which was incapable of retaining the accent in the long run and so
threw it back on the root causing neoacute intonation in the
process. Strangely, I have learned this by reading Kortland very.
very slowly and, not least, following his references.
There is no -U/-o interchange in adjectives. It would seem that
Slavic adjectives have (retained or introduced) *-od in the neuter,
just like Baltic.
Jens