On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 03:56:55 +0100, Miguel Carrasquer
<
mcv@...> wrote:
>First, there is the problem of words such as dvòrU and and
>sítU. They were originally barytone non-acute o-stem
>neuters, so we would expect *dvoró and *sitó. Well,
>*lautgesetzlich* we would expect dvòrU and sítU, since PIE
>*-om regularly gives Slavic -U, but the question is why this
>group of neuters has been singled out to follow the
>soundlaws to the letter, while all others have replaced the
>NAsg. ending PBS *-am with *-a (presumably from the neuter
>pronominal ending -o(d) > *-a).
>
>One might be tempted to think of a conditioned development,
>where stressed *-ám becomes -o, while unstressed *-am
>becomes -U, but this is completely out of character for a
>Slavic soundlaw (no other vocalic developments from PBS to
>Common Slavic depend on the position of the ictus), and it's
>contradicted by cases where stressed *-ám becomes -U
>(acc.sg.masc. *tom > tU) and where unstressed *-am gives -o
>anyway (AP(a) síto, AP(c) mêNso).
I've just read Kortlandt's explanation for dvorU in "Slavic
Accentuation". When the acc.sg. of o-stems became barytone
("barytonesis"), the acc.sg. ending became markedly
unstressed, which clashed with the existence of oxytone
neuters with the same ending (e.g. *p(t)erám). These
therefore adopted the pronominal ending *-á (< *-od). The
barytonic neuters merged with the masculines.
It would be a nice explanation, were it not for the fact
that not _all_ barytonic neuters become masculines. The
AP(a) ones, such as krêslo, síto, ordlo, lêto etc. remain
barytonic and neuter. And not all of those can be explained
as old oxytones affected by Hirt's law.
This also shows that whatever happened to make dvorU etc.
masculine cannot have happened earlier than Dybo's law,
because before that there was no AP(a) vs. AP(b).
That Dybo's law could affect the NA *dváram > *dvarám also
shows that at the time, the form was still a neuter. Else
the advancement of the stress would have been blocked as it
was in the AP(b) masculines (e.g. Acc.sg. *zam~bas does not
become *zambám, because of the pressure from AP(c) [and (a)]
to the efefct that the acc.sg.masc. is supposed to be
unstressed).
What remains incomprehensible to me is why a paradigm like
that of post-Dybo *dvarám didn't merge with the oxytone
neuters such as *perá(m) > peró.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...