--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
>> Yes, and that was my point, and why I think the Lith. forms
>> *are* relevant to Slavic.
I still think they probably aren't. My point was that whether the
laryngeal was deleted from *-RHj- (R={*r,*l,*n,*m}, but not *u) or
not, the (Modern Standard) Lithuanian outcome of, say, *gWr.Hjó:
would be <giriù> anyway. Otherwise you would have to postulate that
at the time Saussure's law operated the syllabification still was
*gí:r.jó: (<.> -- syllable boundary), because otherwise we would have
*gi.rjó: (or, rather, *gi.r'ó: with a palatalized r') with
heterosyllabic i+r, so no acute (syllabic pitch accent can't cross a
syllable boundary, can't it?). But the syllabification like -R.j- is
rather improbable even in Proto-Balto-Slavic, far less at the time of
Saussure's law, which is a rather late phenomenon (hasn't operated in
Latvian) and by which time *j had already disappered from
etymological *Rj as a segmental phoneme, yielding a palatalized *R'
(vs. unpalatalized *R). So the Lithuanian forms may be irrelevant in
the sence they neither support nor contradict Pinault's law.
The only way I see to return the relevance to the Lithuanian forms in
question is to postulate that had the laryngeal been not deleted,
*gWr.Hjó: would yield *gí:r.jó: rather early (before the Balto-Slavic
resyllabification of *-R.j-), so that by the time of Saussure's law
(after the resyllabification) we would have *gí:.r'ó:, which would
yield Lithuanian +<gýriu> instead of the actual <giriù>, thus the
laryngeal *has* been deleted. But then it's a matter of the relative
chronology of the following processes:
(1) *.VRH. > *.V':R. (Balto-Slavic "acutization" of tautosyllabic
VRH);
(2) *R.j > *.Rj (> *r')(Balto-Slavic resyllabification of *R.j, *R=
{r,l,m,n});
(3) Saussure's law.
If it indeed was (1), then (2), then (3), then your are right and the
Lith. forms are relevant, but not so much because <giriù> is end-
stressed, as because it has a short root vowel rather than long
acuted one (<giriù> rather that +<gýriu>). Is that what you meant? If
not, how do you imagine the exact way from *gWr.Hjó: to
<giriù> /g'i.r'ù/?
By the way, any ideas why we still do have <ý> in the preterite
(gýriau, gýrei, gýre:)?
Sergei
Sergei