Re: [tied] Re: No Slavic Accentology, Please!

On 19 Jul 2005 at 13:11, elmeras2000 wrote on the subject of Slavic accentology:

> 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.

I basically agree. In what follows I've numbered the items of the checklist and am going to
improvise a few brief comments. But the list deserves much more: it could be used to compile an
all-embracing typology of views on (B)Sl accentology. That would make a nice book.


[1]

> 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.

OK. (But see below.)


[2]

> 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.

OK. But:

(i) Miguel might disagree here, though.


(ii) There is also Kortlandt's end-stressed subtype which does not undergo the retraction he calls
"Ebeling's law". He needs it for the l-participle and Rick Derksen operates with it to explain a
Baltic metatony that cannot be linked to the presence of a postconsonantal antevocalic *i.


(iii) And there is the confusion around the alleged type (d) in Slavic.


But most of that strikes me as somehow peripheral and the general picture seems unproblematic.


[3]

> Loss of schwa yielding acute by compensatory lengthening, er& > e:r (e"r), is likewise beyond discussion.

Yes (although the formulation is not neutral).


[4]

> 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.

This is perhaps a bit of an understatement. The other day Rick Derksen happened to write me an
e-mail to the effect that alongside the original 1978 version there are versions by Kortlandt,
Shintani, Rasmussen, Matasovic/, Dybo, and Holst. There are pretty serious differences between
those versions and "some hesitation" would seem to be an understatement.


[5]

> There is no disagreement that eH yielded acute long e:, and other sequences of syllabic + laryngeal did the same.

OK. (Again with reservations about the formulation.)


[6]

> 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.

OK.


[7]

> There is complete agreement that lengthened grade in monosyllables had circumflex tone.

I doubt that. Here Rasmussen and Kortlandt happen to agree, but what about others? I for one
have no idea what Dybo would say here, for instance.


[8]

> 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.

OK, for the sake of the argument.


[9]

> For Slavic specifically, there is complete agreement that mobile words developed a falling tone in their first
> syllable (Meillet's law).

OK. (As usual there is no agreement on the mechanism involved.)


[10]

> 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.

OK, but with restrictions. The Moscow people regard it basically as the further development of a
system of high and low tones inherited from PIE. The Leiden people agree with this to some
extent, perhaps entirely, I'm not completely in the clear about their position.


[11]

> 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.

OK, but:

(i) In Moscow, Sergej Nikolaev has personally seen to it that Dybo's law has disintegrated into a
"rightward drift" comprising an entire series of changes which I for one don't understand at all,
but which is held to have enormous consequences for PSl dialectology.


(ii) And in that connection, de Saussure's law has been reformulated for the first time in almost a
century.


(iii) Kortlandt's law is by no means unopposed among the four (five?) specialists in Old Prussian.
To put it mildly.


[12]

> 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.

Yes, but the differences are not trivial.


[Conclusion 1]

> I would say this is very much.

I agree up to a point, but there are a differences between what one sees as an Indo-Europeanist
and what one sees as a slavist.


As an Indo-Europeanist you see a number of nice correspondences that are useful, in particular
(but not only) to pinpoint the presence of laryngeals.


As a slavist (baltist) you see a field where nobody talks to anybody else and where even explicit
reception (let alone discussion or evaluation) of other investigators' ideas seems to be regarded as
not done. It is better than mud-slinging but not by a great margin. A few examples:


(I) The Moscow people keep acting as if the outside world does not exist, witness (for those who
didn't know already) Dybo's recent monograph on Winter's law.



(II) On the other hand Zaliznjak's obviously important book on Russian does not seem to have
been read cover-to-cover by anybody in the twenty years of its existence and has never even
been seriously reviewed.



(III) The seven (give or take) versions of Winter's law cannot possibly all be of equal value, yet
how much critical weighing of alternatives has taken place (apart from one or two fruitless
attempts from Leiden)?


By and large people limit themselves to throwing their own version into the lap of the reader and
apodictically stating that they find other versions "unacceptable" or "difficult to believe" vel sim.
Literally nobody outside Leiden accepts Kortlandt's glottalic interpretation of it, yet I'm not
familiar with even a single systematic discussion. Given the virtual consensus one would have
expected several.


Another point is the rickety foundation of the attribution of accent types to individual items,
particularly in the case of nouns. The word for 'hand' (Lith. _ranka_) has the reflex of fixed stem
stress in Lithuanian (2) and is overwhelmingly mobile in Slavic. The case is typical (most items
are attested with more than a single accent type) and the tradition is just to state apodictically
whichever solution seems most convenient, often on the basis of data from unpublished and
unanalysed manuscripts or dialects. (The massive use of factual material that cannot be publicly
evaluated was initiated by Illich-Svitych, sorry to say.)


(Conclusion 2)

> 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.

I completely agree with the spirit of this remark.



Best,


Willem