--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Mate Kapovic" <mkapovic@...> wrote:
>
> But Stang cited Ivsic for the Posavina material so he must have
known his
> work. So we cannot really assume that he didn't read Prilog za
slavenski
> akcenat as well. And the fact is that he hasn't credited Ivsic
while
> explaining the retraction. But we cannot know for sure what
happened - it is
> always possible to say that he just read it and later forgot about
it.
> Anyway, it wasn't Stang himself who named the retraction Stang's
Law. So it
> is not only his fault....
I agree with the final point. Also, by writing "Slavonic
Accentuation" Stang wanted first of all to rid the subject of the
dominating influence of Kurylowicz (which he regarded as
fundamentally mistaken) and return to classical neogrammarian values.
It wasn't his purpose to digest and evaluate the entire literature,
which would have forced him to take a stand with respect not only to
Ivsic, but also to Belic, van Wijk, Lehr-Splawinski, Bubrich,
Bulaxovskij and a host of others. He would have needed hundreds of
pages for that and his book would inevitably have lost focus. In
actual fact Stang wasn't interested in the accentological literature.
What he was interested in was archaic dialectal facts that couldn't
easily be explained as secondary and that is why he used "Danasnji
posavski govor" and "Cakavstina kvarnerskih otoka" and similar
descriptive publications. "Stang's law" is not the only regularity he
rediscovered (his rule for the determining of length of the thematic
vowel in Slovak is another example).
Willem