From: Thomas Olander
Message: 35999
Date: 2005-01-18
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "willemvermeer" <wrvermeer@...> wrote:
> I'll try, but I know no more than you do, having only FK's
> publications to go on. Unfortunately I have to start with a few
> generalities to avoid misunderstandings.
>
> The most intricate and innovative part of FK's accentological theory
> is his relative chronology of late Slavic innovations (i.e. the
> second and third chapters of his book). By far the most important
> purpose of that chronology is to generate a system of vowel
> quantities from which the attested distributions (which are more
> intricate than is generally realized) can be derived.
>
> Historically, Slavic vowel quantity has rarely been treated as a
> problem in its own right. The traditional terminological system that
> uses words like "acute" and "neoacute" (etcetera) to refer to
> prosodic phenomena talks only about what happens in stressed
> syllables and combines quantity with tone into undigestable units.
> Interest in vowel length in unstressed syllables has been extremely
> limited.
>
> There have of course been exceptions, notably in the early decades of
> the twentieth century. For us the one that is most relevant is Stang,
> who describes, or at least mentions, a whole range of phenomena
> involving vowel quantity that a good theory of Slavic accentuation
> should account for. FK's theory is an attempt to do just that. (FK's
> theory is an attempt to solve Stang's problems in the light of
> Ebeling's chronology and the early publications of the Moscow
> School.)
>
> In the post-Stang era, however, the influence of the Moscow School
> has caused interest to be focused rather onesidedly first on problems
> involving the place of the stress and second to problems common to
> Slavic and Baltic. The present wave of attempts to reformulate Hirt's
> and Winter's laws illustrates that onesidedness as well as anything.
>
> Many features of FK's theory that have struck outsiders as odd or
> worse have the purpose of generating the correct Slavic vowel
> quantities in the correct positions. That includes the oft-deplored
> decision to postpone the elimination of the reflex of the product of
> the merger of the laryngeals to the Slavic period and spread it out
> over three stages. And a host of other features that have struck
> people as objectionable, or have remained unnoticed and uncommented
> on.
>
> Now back to the specifics of the theory.
>
> One of the features of FK's theory that have often been overlooked is
> the way the loss of the stressability of final jers interacts with
> Dybo's law: first *final* jers (non-final jers are another story)
> lose the ability of carrying the stress and only then Dybo's law
> takes place. As a consequence, such forms as pre-Dybo *st'olU retain
> the stress, which can no longer move to the next syllable, which
> consists of a final jer only, contrast Gsg *st'ola > *stol'a.
>
> This chronology is motivated entirely by the quantitative phenomena
> it is designed to explain (see Slavic Accentuation pp. 15-17).
> Whoever is not aware of that fact, will tend to reject it out of hand
> as perverse, if it is noticed at all.
>
> A change like ljudÍmU, ljudÍxU > ljúdImU, ljúdIxU is impossible
> because non-final jers are not held to have lost the stress at the
> stage involved and because those particular jers ultimately became
> strong, so reconstructed *ljudÍmU and *ljudÍxU would end up with
> stress on the ending in the attested material, just like *sestr'amU
> *sestr'axU or *voz'omU *voz'e^xU or what have you, leaving R. ljúdjam
> ljúdjax (and other phenomena) unaccounted for.
>
> I don't want to suggest that FK's reconstruction is without
> complications, far from it. In order to account for ljudjam/ljudjax
> and related phenomena he has to assume that the loss of the
> stressability of word-final jers took place before the classical
> distinction between strong and weak jers arose. Not everybody will
> like that.
>
> Does this help?
>
>
> Willem