[tied] Re: Slavic accentual mobility

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Mate Kapovic" <mkapovic@...>
wrote:

> The point I am trying to make is that inital accent appears all

around the

> system in a. p. c and that there is no reason for claiming that

it's origin

> in aorist comes from monosyllabic verbs originally. So 2/3 sg

aorist cannot

> be evidence in your monosyllabic theory. Bad "evidence" only

weaken your

> theory.

The assignment of a lexeme to the mobile class "c" needs a reason,
especially in the case of stems ending in -VH- which ought to move
the stem into class "a" by Hirt's law. In such lexemes monosyllabic
forms supply the *only* basis I can find to allow transfer to the
mobile class. And the 2/3sg of the aorist qualifies eminently.


[...]

> If one cites only one word it means nothing (in some dialects
> for instance, all the words can be either a. p. a or a. p. b -

does an

> attestion of a. p. b from that dialect mean anything if you're

trying to

> decide on whether a noun was originally b or c?).

No, the rules must be known. They are mostly just implied which
makes the whole business of Slavic accent immensely difficult.

> [...] BSlavic *can* be innovative here but I am
> trying to say that this methodology of looking for archaisms or

supposed

> archaisms isn't very good.

I think it would be terrible not to do just that.

> He stumbles upon a word which accidentally suits
> him and there you have it - it's an archaism! (By the way, in PIE

itself,

> the accent *wl´kwos is not expected considering the Nullstufe.

Could it be

> that BSl mobile *vilkas is a real archaism here? :-)).

It would be surprising, and the shared surprise offered by Vedic,
Germanic and Greek (to the extent the words can be combined) would
be a small miracle.

> Another example of such a faulty methodology is one I saw in one of
> Vermeer's articles. He quotes as an example Dubrovnik variant ne``

zna:m

> alongside ne` zna:m "I don't know" and tries to push the first one

back to

> PIE as an example of original initial stress. The real truth is

it's just a

> very young innovation which is widely known and widespread in some

dialects.

That does indeed sound like an unsafe thing to do, given the general
productivity of mobility (c, as in ne`` zna:m).

Jens