Re: [tied] Thematic vowel etc

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 10:21:19 +0000, tgpedersen
<tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>
>The Russian adj. inflection in m.nom. has ´-yj, but when stressed
>it's -ój.
>Now here's a hen-or-egg discussion:
>1) did the /o/ attract the stress? or
>2) did the stress change the /y/ to /o/?

In fact, the /o/ is there also when unstressed (it's just
not written, under Church Slavic influence). For instance,
<russkij> is pronounced [rúsk&j] (St. Petersburg
pronunciation, I think).

The nom.sg. ending is historically -U + jI, which makes
-UjI, written -yjI (the letter <y> is a ligature of <U> and
<i>), and partially so pronounced, but not in a large part
of Russia, where the development is regular: final yer is
deleted, previous yer becomes a full vowel, so -UjI > -oj.

>The most reasonable seems of course to assume 2).
>We know that o-grade of an ablaut vowel occurs when stress has been
>shifted from somewhere else to that vowel.

Do we?

>Supposedly, the first
>step was that all stressed ablaut vowel got e-grade and the rest of
>them zero grade. But the part about the zero grade can't be right,
>since how can a vowel in zero grade, in other words, that isn't
>there, develop into an /o/ when it's stressed, when there is nothing
>there to be stressed? So I think Glen is right that in the first
>step the unstressed ablaut vowels did not disappear (get zero
>grade), but developed into some type of schwa, which then could
>either get stress in the next step and become /o/, or not, in which
>case it disappeared and truly became zero grade.
>
>As for the verbal thematic vowel I can't say anything, but about the
>one in nouns I can make this observation:
>Of all the things that were inflected like nouns in the beginning,
>the demonstratives were the only ones that were not syllabic.

Why do you say that? I've never seen an asyllabic
demonstrative.

> That
>means they could not possibly have stress anywhere in the stem, but
>must have it on the suffix. Therefore the demonstratives grew a
>vowel and now look as if they have a thematic vowel.
>
>Note this German example:
>nom. das warme Wasser
>dat. dem warmen Wasser "the warm water"
>cf. without demonstrative
>nom. warmes Wasser
>dat. warmem Wasser "warm water"
>Note the endings of the adj.!
>
>Now why does German do that?

Because Germanic used to have definite and indefinite
adjectives, just like Slavic, only using a different method:
the definite adjectives were n-stems (the indefinite
adjectives had mostly pronominal endings).


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...