--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Mate Kapovic" <mkapovic@...> wrote:
> > > Also, I cannot find an explanation in Kortlandt 1975 why does
the
> > nom. sg.
> > > of a. p. b have a neo-acute (*poN~tI) if there was no Dybo and
no
> > retraction
> > > from the jer.
Then I had written:
> > Yet if you follow his reasoning in the "konj" chapter (13-19)
closely
> > you'll find out easily that it is the regular reflex and that it
is
> > *not* a neo-acute in the sense in which that term is used by
> > Kortlandt (notably p. 17, which, by the way, is still awaiting
> > elaboration).
Then you wrote
> I must be blind, I cannot find the explanation for the neo-acute in
*poN~tI
> (which is not really a neo-acute according to Kortlandt and you as
it seems,
> I have no idea why).
>
I'd promised to get back to this. It has to do mainly with Dybo's law
and is basically simple.
As is well known, Dybo's law is held to have been a forward stress
movement from syllables that are neither falling nor acute (speaking
in traditional terms), let me call them "non-acute rising" for the
sake of this posting. Kortlandt assumes that by the type Dybo's law
operated, the stress no longer could move to word-final jers, so in
that position the pre-Dybo non-acute rising tone stayed on: *stòlU
remained *stòlU and *póNtI remained *póNtI.
Syllables that received the stress as a consequence of Dybo's law
became falling if the vowel was long, and non-acute rising if it was
short. (By this stage, acute was no longer distinct from non-acute in
unstressed syllables.)
Then acute vowels lost the acute (laryngeal) feature, becoming
contrastively short and rising. This eliminated the contrast
between "acute" and "non-acute rising". From this stage on you only
have "falling" and "rising".
[I won't bother with the shortening of long falling vowels in certain
positions, which did not change the system.]
Finally, the stress was retracted again from falling vowels in non-
initial syllables. This is Stang's law. The newly stressed syllables
became rising. If the newly stressed vowel was *o [or *e] K assumes
that it was diphthongized, introducing a difference between instances
of short *o that carried the stress even before Stang's law operated
and those that received it only as a result of Stang's law.
Now if one wants to insist on using the term "neoacute" one has to
decide what one is talking about. Traditionally, the term was used to
refer to any stressed vowel that is reconstructed as rising for the
final phase of Slavic but not acute, or more ofte a subset of those
vowels.
In Stang's scheme, the term neoacute is reserved for vowels in stem-
stressed forms of type (b) words, put differently, for vowels that
became stressed as a consequence of the stress retraction that now
carries his name. There is no separate word (apart from, I
think, "rising") he uses to refer to the numerous vowels that were
neither falling nor neoacute in the sense of the definition. That is
a serious gap in the terminological apparatus because its effect is
to close the minds of beginner for the very existence of those
vowels, even apart from the fact that one is entitled to an answer to
the question whether or not they are prosodically distinct from the
neo-acute. If they are, we urgently need a term to refer to them. If
they are not, why use a different word?
Things became much more complicated when Dybo's law was discovered
(say 1962-63). Now a conceptual apparatus was needed to refer to the
various elements of the prosodic system that preceded Dybo's law. It
turns out that if the diachrony is reconstructed as a sequence of
steps, *the neo-acute is not a new tone at all*, it just continues
the (non-acute) rising tone that had been a feature of the system for
may generations. In Kortlandt's scheme (on the details of which I
don't insist in this context, it is only an example) the only new
element that Stang's law introduced was a diphthongal reflex of *o,
but referring to that as "neo-acute" would obviously be extremely
misleading.
The term neoacute was introduced a century ago in order to be able to
refer to a certain element of the final reconstructable phase of
Slavic, in modern terms: for the system as it existed just after
Stang's law operated. It is not suitable for earlier phases. And it
is not really suitable for the final phase either, because it blurs
the distinction between tone and vowel length and between synchroniy
and diachrony. It should go the way of phlogiston.
You wrote in this context:
> I don't think it's such a problem in non-Kortlandt accentology. For
> instance, if you have two rising accents you have to name them - so
one is
> called "acute" and the other "neo-acute" because it's a newer
rising accent.
It has nothing to do with Kortlandt's theory but with the discovery
of Dybo's law, which shows that what one used to call "neo-acute" is
just a non-acute rising tone which arose whenever it was that the
difference between it and the falling tone arose and was present in
the system ever since.
W.