Re: No Slavic Accentology, Please!

From: elmeras2000
Message: 39323
Date: 2005-07-19

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "pielewe" <wrvermeer@...> wrote:
> ---
>
>
>
> Does anybody out there understand why it is so difficult to get
people
> to agree, or even communicate, about Slavic accentology??
>
>
> I'm stymied.

Does that hurt?

I do not think the lack of agreement is as great as said about it. I
know of quite many facts pertaining to the development of accent in
Slavic and Baltic which are now completely above discussion.

Nobody will deny that IE paradigmatic mobility is continued as a
mobile accent paradigm in BSl. Nor will anybody disagree with the
statement that the IE mobility, which was basically one between
adjacent syllables, has been polarized to give an accent that dances
between the beginning and the end of the word. The may be
disagreement over how this came about, but the input and the output
are beyond dispute.

Likewise, there can be no disagreement that IE endstressed words
became mobile in BSl. One may disagree as to whether this happened
all by itself, i.e. by a simple reduction of the number of types, or
there was a sound law or a series of sound laws to produce it. If it
*can* happen all by itself, a sound law will be hard to prove.

Loss of schwa yielding acute by compensatory lengthening, er& > e:r
(e"r), is likewise beyond discussion. So is the acute reflex of
cases of Winter's lengthening. There is still some hesitation as to
the nature of the restrictions imposed upon Winter's law, but its
existence and its result are common heritage by now.

There is no disagreement that eH yielded acute long e:, and other
sequences of syllabic + laryngeal did the same. I know of no serious
objections to the existence of Hirt's Law either - I know of a few
Besserwissers' voices of rejection, but they can just be ignored.

There is complete agreement that lengthened grade in monosyllables
had circumflex tone. There is a voice of dissent from Leiden as to
the tone on lengthened grade in longer words, but there are very few
examples, so the question is only of marginal interest.

For Slavic specifically, there is complete agreement that mobile
words developed a falling tone in their first syllable (Meillet's
law). It is also without opposition that the accent moves onto
clitics in the mobile type. There may be little agreement of how
that came about - by itself (increase of the polarization) or by a
series of sound changes, but the facts are universally accepted.

There is also general acceptance of Dybo's law, the shift of the
accent from a non-acute vowel to the next, except in mobile
paradigms. The process is not unlike Saussure's law for Lithuanian,
and Kortlandt's law for Old Prussian, only the restrictions differ.
I have seen no opposition to these laws.

Also Stang's law is common ground: the retraction fo the accent from
a place where it could not stand to the preceding vowel which
developed the neoacute. There are perhaps nuances as to exactly what
kind of segments could not keep the accent, but certainly the
reduced vowels and circumflex long vowels qualify.

I would say this is very much. It is absolutely wrong to portray
Slavic accentology as a field of no use because there is no
agreement about anything. That only provides the lazy ones with the
pillow they need to sleep on. The easy way is of course to learn
only that you do not need to learn anything. It's like discrediting
the Stammbaum for the sake of not having to learn anything about the
facts of comparative linguistics in IE. That is acutally done in
wide circles these days, and the harm done to the field is very
dangerous. We should know better than to encourage this.

Jens