Re: [tied] Re: Various loose thoughts

On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 12:24:05 +0000, willemvermeer
<wrvermeer@...> wrote:

>Not so fast. Arno Verweij and me found out that most of the rules
>responsible for the rise of lateral mobility can be understood also
>in terms of the analogical generalization of low or high tones under
>fairly trivial conditions, e.g. generalization of L as the tone of
>all accusative endings starting from a system in which some
>accusative endings are H and others L.

I don't get it (apart from the fact that in my view all
accusatives were L [_singular_ accusatives: the plural ones
were all H]). Is this Fortunatov's law again? There is no
relationship between mobile stress and the tonality of the
desinence.

>Both Hirt's and Ebeling's laws
>can be reformulated in terms of neutralization of the contrast
>between H and L in final syllables given certain phonetic conditions,
>with the "architoneme" being realized more like L than like H.

I don't think Hirt's law has anything to do with final
syllables. It also retracts the stress off medial syllables
(krah2-dhé-ti > kra"detI). In any case, as I said, Hirt's
law has nothing to do with acuteness per se: *te\n(&)/wós
(acute first syllable) > Latv. tiêvs, without Hirt's law).

>I've not said it is pretty or preferable or even necessary, but it
>looks at least feasible, so it may be better to keep an open mind as
>long as so much is so uncertain.
>
>
>Note also that in K's scheme the reflex of the laryngeals has nothing
>to do with tone throughout the BSl period and that K sticks to
>Winter's original formulation of what we now call Winter's law, which
>does not depend on the place of the stress.
>
>
>So what Arno and me found was that the BSl segment of K's theory
>appears to be compatible in principle with the fairly long retention
>of inherent tone the MAS people like to operate with. But it is just
>an experiment all the same. It is not at all compelling, except that
>it taught us that it would be a good idea to keep an open mind.
>
>> The PIE tonal system, as far as it can be deduced from the
>> Greek and Vedic evidence, was very much connected to the
>> stress. Short stressed vowels had rising tone (udatta),
>> stressed long vowels also had (long) rising tone, except
>> when they were the result of contractions, in which case
>> they had (super)long falling tone (circumflex). Post-tonic
>> vowels had falling tone (svarita), all others were toneless
>> (anudatta).
>
>
>If you reverse the description, stress turns out to be an automatic
>consequence of the tonal movement within a word form. If I'm
>correctly informed, both the Indian and the Greek grammarians
>described their systems in terms of tonal movements.

There are good reasons not to reverse the description, the
main one being, as I said, zero grade.

>> Resonants (*m, *n, *l, *r, *w, *y) after a vowel (i.e.
>> diphthongs) had falling tone in Balto-Slavic, which was
>> possibly inherited from PIE. In that case, Greek has given
>> up the feature for *m, *n, *r, *l (e.g. in <poimé:n> the -n
>> behaves as a plain consonant, not affecting the tone, which
>> was originally circumflex as in Lith. piemuo~).
>
>
>This looks like an intrusion of foreign elements into the discussion.

It's an attempt at showing that the Balto-Slavic and Greek
systems derive from a common source, despite apparent
mismatches. In the case of -V:R (-V::) and -VHR endings,
Greek has an acute, while BS has a circumflex. This is due
to the fact that in Greek such sequences (unless involving
*y and *w) were no longer treated as (rising-falling)
diphthongs, so that the tone of the first part (rising) is
all that's left.

>> I can find no evidence in Baltic and Slavic that the
>> stressed vowel had rising/high tone.
>
>
>Well, to the MAS people the stress assignment rule ("konturnoe
>pravilo")*is* the evidence. (Note that there is no direct link with
>the tones earlier investigators have postulated for PIE and PSl. In
>K's theory "acute" means 'glottalic' until very deep into the history
>of the separate branches.)
>
>
>> Dybo's law in Slavic
>> and Saussure's law in Lithuanian rather suggest the
>> contrary: a short stressed vowel had falling tone (Dybo's
>> law might suggest that svarita vowels had rising tone, but
>> this is not confirmed by Lithuanian).
>
>
>Both Dybo's law and de Saussure's law are so recent within the
>respective branches of BSl that the conditions they presuppose cannot
>be projected back without further ado into the BSl period.

If something like Dybo's law also occurred in Old Prussian,
as Kortlandt argues (I haven't seen the evidence, and my
knowledge of Old Prussian is so minimal that I'm not sure I
would be able to evaluate it), then it looks as if short
stressed vowels, at least in initial syllables, shared a
characteristic at the Balto-Slavic level, namely that they
had falling, or at any rate non-rising, tone.

>I'm not going to comment on your proposals. What I'm trying to do is
>clarify the MAS scheme and K's theory, so that effective criticism
>may some day become possible.
>
>Willem

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