Re: [tied] Balto-Slavic accentology

>
> On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 00:13:29 +0100 (CET), mkapovic@...
> wrote:
>
> [me:]
>>> - Stang's law. The accent is retracted from weak (usually
>>> final, a.p. c) yers, and from medial long circumflex
>>> (non-acute) vowels (e.g. iterative -i~-, lengthened thematic
>>> vowel -é~- [what caused this?]).
>>
>>Nothing caused it. There was no lengthening of thematic -e-. It's just a
>>myth. The -e- is still short in Croatian a. p. c stems, in two archaic a.
>>p. b verbs (mogu and hoc'u) and it's short in Czech as well. Slovak -e-
>> is
>>short in a. p. a and b.
>
> If I understand Dybo et al.'s brief treatment in OSA p. 18
> correctly, there are traces of length (in SCr, Svk, OCze,
> OPol) in all three a.p.'s, but not everywhere at once.

Yes, but the material points to the conclusion that all length in -e- is
secondary and younger. It was introduced from -i:- and -a:- < *-aje- stems
in which the length is original.

>In
> SCr. there is only length where the acute (a.p. a)

Yes.

>or
> neoacute (a.p. b) has been maintained, but the -e- is short
> where the (neo-)acute has become a neocircumflex.
>
> In any case, even if mogu and hoc'u have short -e-, the
> retraction of the accent (mo'z^e, ho'c'e) is not
> understandable unless the -e- was once long, and triggered
> Stang's law.

Well, that's not a reason to assume length if there's no length. Mogu and
hoću absolutely keep the most archaic a. p. b pattern in Croatian. In the
standard language, those two are the only ones which have -u in 1sg, the
only ones that have the oposition of desinential stress in 1sg and
stem-stress in other persons. They are the only a. p. b verbs that have no
length (it is there secondarily in eastern dialects and also in Standard
Serbian). The verbs with -u in 1sg always keep the original archaic
pattern (also in a. p. c in dialects). So I would say that mo``žeš and
ho``ćeš preserve the old short -e-.
You don't need Stang's Law to explain these examples - there are number of
solutions, simple analogy to other a. p. b verbs *with* long thematic
vowel and the retraction in order to avoid confusion with a. p. c verbs
with the stress retracted from the final yer.

> Willem Vermeer (in Lehfeldt 2001) refers to Gustavsson '69
> for a description of the phenomena, and to Kortlandt '75
> (pp. 29-32) for an explanation. I haven't been able to
> consult Gustavsson yet. The passage in Kortlandt refers to
> van Wijk's law (gybnes^I > gyne:s^I), which would mean that
> the lengthening would only be regular in a subset of the
> né-verbs (perhaps also the jé-verbs?). I also recall a
> suggestion, but I forget where, that the length was
> originally confined to the 3pl. (-oN-, indeed long in e.g.
> Polish -a,) and spread analogically from there.
>

Mate