Re: Various loose thoughts

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> I'm still trying to figure out what happened to the o-stems
> in Slavic, accentually speaking.

Various accentological theories differ so strongly from one another
that discussion tends to be pointless unless done very thoroughly.
Yet I would like to ask questions about one or two points.

> In any case, the rise of the ins.sg. ending *-omi ~ *-umi
> sealed the fate of the oxytonic forms in the o-stem
> masculine sg..

Why? It is obviously end-stressed outside the o-stems, so why would
it be stem-stressed there? And what about the locative singular?

> All the more remarkable, then, that the
> barytonic forms which should have been affected by Dybo's
> law (*zóNbU => *zoNbÚ) instead merged with the mobile type
> (zôNbU, gen. zôNba), as if Dybo's law had been blocked in at
> least the NA sg. and NA pl./du. (=> a.p. d) or in the whole
> singular and the NA pl./du. (=> a.p. c). In the non-acute
> neuter barytones (the dvorU-group), Dybo's law was not
> blocked, but the words became masculines, and did not merge
> with the already existing a.p. b neuters (peró, vêdró). And
> in *that* category, there was no retraction of the accent in
> the acute-root forms (vêdro), even though the forms with a
> circumflex root (mêNso, jâje) became mobile.

How certain is it that a.p. d exists in the first place? I'm not in a
position to evaluate all of the primary evidence, but the Croatian
evidence (which is generally regarded as primary both in time and as
to importance) is so extremely thin as to be non-existent by any but
the loosest standards, at least for the time being. And surely there
would seem to be no sense in wanting to account for non-existent
evidence.

> On pp. 64-67 of Stang's accentology, there is a complicated
> argument concerning the stress of the Lithuanian illatives
> and allatives, used by some as evidence that the Lith.
> mobile paradigms had originally had final stress everywhere.
> Looking at the whole thing from my point of view, I don't
> see any problem.

I agree emphatically that there is no problem. In Lithuanian there
still is a partial connection between the phonetic weight of an
ending and its stressability in mobile paradigms. Disyllabic endings
are always stressed. So if new disyllabic endings would appear (as
happened in the case of the illative etc.) they would risk becoming
end-stressed by analogy even if built on an originally stem-stressed
form like the acc.sg. This shows that Stang's evidence is no
evidence. In the passage involved, Stang is trying to make a case for
his conception of (b) as Balto-Slavic. Dybo/Illic^-Svityc^'s
conception of (b) as the outcome of Slavic innovations made this
unnnecessary. The very tortuousness of Stang's prose suggests that
something is desperately wrong here.


Willem Vermeer