Petusek wrote:
> The prothetic v- is a strange phenomenon, indeed. It's still very
> productive in Central Bohemia (the area of Prague), so we have the word
> "okno", "oko" in the literary Czech and in Moravian dialects, wherease
> "vokno", "voko" in Bohemian dialects. Note that the prothetic v- accurs
> mainly (if not only) befor o-.
Many rural dialects in Poland insert a prothetic [w] of post-Common
Slavic origin (therefore not [v]) before any initial /o/: [woko],
[wokno], which only goes to show that filling an empty onset with a prop
glide is a natural thing to do. Polish normally leaves old *u from *au,
*ou alone (<ucho> 'ear', <ul> 'beehive', etc.), and contrasts, say,
<l/óz.ko> 'bed' with <uszko> 'ear (dimin.)' as /wus^ko/ vs. /us^ko/ (the
latter usually with an initial glottal stop), but Old Polish hesitated
between <uj> and <wuj> /vuj/ 'uncle' (with old prothesis) and now we
only have the latter form.
After the nearly complete elimination of /a-/ from early Polish,
loanwords with initial /a-/ must have sounded as if they lacked
something. In names like Agnieszka (= Agnes) or Ambroz.y (= Ambrose)
there's no prothesis in standard Polish, but the regional dialects often
show /ja-/ (Jagnieszka/Jagna, Jambroz.), demonstrating the latent
productivity of j-prothesis. Cf. dialectal Jewa (standard Ewa = Eve),
and, with further complications, even standard Jadwiga (= Hedwig). About
the 16th/17th c. loanwords with /a-/ were often embellished with a
prothetic glottal glide, e.g. armata ~ harmata 'cannon'.
Piotr