From: mkapovic@...
Message: 36366
Date: 2005-02-17
>OK. How does Kortland's theory explain Croat. dial. dat. pl. grado``m <
>
> --- 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: *stňlU
> remained *stňlU 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 Finally, the stress was retracted again from falling vowels in non-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.