Re: Various loose thoughts

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> ...There is no
> relationship between mobile stress and the tonality of the
> desinence.

There *is* in the MAS view. Mind you, it is *their* tonality and
definitely *not* the tonality of the handbooks (acute/circumflex in
Greek and Lithuanian etc.). Those are entirely separate matters.

> ... 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).

This is the very example the Kortlandt people invariably adduce to
argue that Hirt's law was sensitive to the position of whatever was
the reflex of the laryngeal at the time, in other words: that the
reflex of the laryngeals at the time was a segmental phoneme.


[On Vedic and Greek:]

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

As I said earlier, I would very much like to hear the cognoscenti
about this point. But why not consider the possibility that the
Indian and Greek scholars had a point when they described their
systems in terms of tone movements?

> ... 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.

Those tones have nothing to do with the tonal phenomena the
discussion is about. They are entirely separate. It is an intrusion
of foreign elements into the discussion.

> 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.

This presupposes that a falling tone is better at ceding the stress
to the following syllable than a rising one. Note that the tone that
lost the stress to the following syllable in accordance with Dybo's
law was contrastively opposed to a tone the Slavic comparative
evidence suggests was falling.


Best,


Willem