Re: NEuropean IE for apple

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, I had written:

> >There is an alternative explanation ...
> >
> >
> >In my view the difference was accentological. The 'egg' word is
> >mobile, whereas the 'apple' word (and also, say, the 'lamb' word)

are

> >stem-stressed. As a consequence you got on the one hand [the
> >accentual sign merely indicates the place of the stress]:
> >
> >
> >*tò aje 'that egg', with the stress on _to_ because both _to_ and
> >*aje are mobile and the NAsg of the neuter o-stems is what the
> >Russians call an enclinomenon.
> >
> >
> >and on the other:
> >
> >
> >*to àblko 'that apple', *to àgneN 'that lamb'.
> >
> >
> >The labial element can't have failed to be more salient in the

former

> >type of case, where it was the rounded vowel that was stressed,

than

> >in the latter. This may have tipped the balance in the dialectal

area

> >continued by Czech and Slovak.

Then Miguel wrote:

> The case of vejce, vajce is unique, as far as I know, so any
> explanation will necessarily have to be somewhat ad-hoc.

I agree in principle, note that I talk merely about "an alternative
explanation". What the proposal tries to do is explain the behaviour
of a single item in terms of features we can be reasonably confident
were present in the language. In a sense that is not ad hoc. But
deciding in such cases which of a number of alternative explanations
is preferable soon gets very tricky.


Miguel:

> If your explanation above is correct, ...

It is not my explanation, I'm morally certain it is somewhere in the
literature.


Miguel:

> ... we would expect mobile
> neuters to show prothetic v- more often than non-mobile
> neuters. While forms like voko and vuxo do exist, I don't
> have the impression that there's a correlation between
> accent paradigm or gender and v- (cf. vohon', wokno,
> vostryj, vulica, etc.).

No, I don't think that follows, because:


(1) In examples like *to aje and *to agneN the two adjacent vowels
differ as to roundedness, which is likely to have been more salient
if *to was stressed, enhancing the chance of a prothetic v-
appearing. On the other hand in *tò oko and, say, whatever way *to
okUno was stressed at the moment involved, both vowels were rounded,
so the two kinds of accentuation make no difference.


(2) If neuters behaved in a particular way in a certain highly
specific type of cases, it does not follow that observable
differences are to be expected in other types of cases.

> [The objection that *ajIce itself
> is not mobile, but rather a.p. b, can be countered by
> suggesting the v- originally arose in the simplex *aje,
> subsequently lost in Czech and Slovak].

Yes, even today the simplex is attested more widely than it is
usually believed to be. Curiously the newly discovered 12th-century
Russian attestation lacks the prothetic j- of _jajco_ etc. But that
may not mean anything much.


Willem