Re: [tied] Re: Various loose thoughts

On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 17:07:25 +0000, pielewe
<wrvermeer@...> wrote:

>--- 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.

But I prefer to view Balto-Slavic accentology as a subfield
of Indoeuropeanistics...

>> ... 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.

Yes, it's the Paradebeispiel.

>[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?

Stress and tone are completely equivalent in Vedic. Greek
has the complication of the circumflex, but there too
there's a direct relation between stress and tone.

>> ... 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.

They may not matter to the MAS model or to Kortlandt's
model, but they are important to me.

>> 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.

The acute is also falling in modern Lithuanian. The IE
comparative evidence suggests however that the acute was a
rising accent, and the circumflex falling. Especially the
latter, of course, but that makes the acute rising by
default.


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