Re: [tied] Re: Various loose thoughts

On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 06:17:13 +0000, willemvermeer
<wrvermeer@...> wrote:

>--- 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?

The ins.sg. in the o-stems is recent (replacing the old ins.
in *-oh1, which I believe was end-stressed in mobile
paradigms, despite Lithuanian, cf. Russ. vc^erá). It was
built by adding -mi to the accusative, and therefore it was
stem-stressed. In the i-, u- and probably the C-stems, the
instrumental in -mi is Balto-Slavic, predates Pedersen's
law, and has end-stress (by analogy with the original
oxytonic PIE instr. in *-éh1 and/or the oxytonic a:-stem and
o-stem instrumental sg.).

>> 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.

The existence of a.p. d, which I'm also not in a position to
evaluate, is non-essential. We have a group of masculine
o-stems which we would have expected to be a.p. b according
to the soundlaws (specifically, Dybo's law), but which
surface as a.p. c. If some words in some dialects still
show transitional forms between a.p.'s b and c [i.e. "a.p.
d"] that's nice to have, but doesn't really change the fact
that we have to assume a transition b > c anyway. Of course
if a.p. d *does* exist in the way Dybo et al. have diagnosed
it, it means that the change affected the nom./acc. forms
first or more strongly, the sg. oblique only later or more
weakly, which has consequences for the mechanisms and
relative chronology that can be proposed to explain the
transition.

>> 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.

Yes, there was no a.p. b in the a:-stems and masculine
o-stems before Dybo's law, as Stang would have it (of course
he didn't know about Dybo's law when that was written).

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