Re: [tied] Re: Nominative Loss. A strengthened theory?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sergejus Tarasovas" <S.Tarasovas@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 12:44 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: Nominative Loss. A strengthened theory?

> Could you explain your notation? What <h> is supposed to mean?

Just regular Croatian [x]. The idea that Shtokavian -a: comes from -ah
< -7h7 (from locative pl. of u-stems) was proposed first by Schleicher.

> And what about the neo-circumflex in the G. pl., supposedly induced
> by the longevity of the previuos syllable (as probably is neo-
> circumflex in general)?

Neocircumflex has it's origines in many cases by the length of the following
syllable, but in many cases it doesn't. The change was grammaticalised and
it spread elsewhere. I think it was analogical in g. plural. We had neoacute
in g. pl. of a. p. b and c (tra~v, gla~v) which spread analogically to short
vowel stems (ze~n, no~g) and this caused an analogical change in g. pl. of
a. p. a nouns. And the only thing that old acute could become was
neocircumflex. It has to be noted that not only Slovene and Kajkavian (which
have neocircumflex which shows former length in the following syllable) have
neocircumflexe in g. pl. - Shtokavian also has it (vra``na - vra^na:), Czech
(cf. vrána - vran). Curiously, East Slavic shows no trace of it.

> Dybo also lists Slovene (dialectal?) -á as a possible direct reflex
> of *-U:, though its not clear (from what I've got to hand) what
> material he means exactly.

It is not dialectal.The ending -á appears in literary Slovene in a couple of
nouns (like gorá, st&zá etc.) but it seems to be an independant phenomenon.
Stankiewicz explains it as the extension of initial -a- from other plural
cases to genitive plural.

> *I* am not arguing with you on that (the idea doesn't seem very
> plausible to me as well). Just trying to make you argue with Dybo. :)

That is not a very difficult task I'm afraid.... :-)

Mate