[tied] Re: No Slavic Accentology, Please!

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Willem Vermeer" <wrvermeer@...>
wrote:

> On 2 Aug 2005 at 13:37, elmeras2000 wrote:
>
> [On the Moscow revision of de Saussure's law:]
>
>
> > It's not ran~komis, ran~kose again, is it?
>
>
> Bingo! Plus ça change ....
>
>
>
> [On Winter's law:]
>
>
> > I do not see what is surprising about glìnda (1), Latv. gni~da,

Sl.

> > *gni"da (a). If there was a sequence *-ind- in it at some point,
> > that should produce *-i:nd- regardless of the position of the

accent.

>
>
> But that way you don't get the Slavic form.

Come on, this is one of those assi-dissi-words: The second -n- in -
nind- is by assimilation to the first, the Lith. -l- is by
dissimilation, and the Slavic replacement by length can also be
dissimilation.

> [On Illich-Svitych's use of dialect descriptions to prove the non-

occurrence of the transition of (b)

> to (c) in masculine o-stems.]
>
>
>
> > How much of it is wrong? I had got the impression that there

were

> > indeed some errors of detail in the dialect descriptions, but

that

> > the general message remained sound. Could you illustrate how

wrong

> > this impression is?
>
>
> It is emphatically not a matter of errors of detail. Unfortunately

this can't be done briefly.

>
>
> The central point is the following. SCr dialects are very complex.

As a consequence, quite a few

> dialect descriptions are not reliable enough for Slavic

accentology to operate with. This is an

> elementary truth known to everybody who deals with that kind of

material. (And the same holds

> for Slovene and Lithuanian.)
>
>
>
> A. "Istria".
>
>
> The allegedly Istrian material (from Nemanic/ 1883-1885) is from a

description that mixes

> information from many different but unspecified places (also

outside Istria) and normalizes the

> results. That is enough to make it quite worthless as a source.

(Dialectologically speaking the

> area covered by Nemanic/ is known to be extremely heterogeneous.)

When Ill.-Sv. dredged up

> Nemanic/'s work, it had not been used by serious accentologists

for more than half a century.

>
>
> B. Susak.
>
>
> The Susak material is from a description written by three authors:

Josip Hamm, Mate Hraste and

> Petar Guberina (Hrvatski dialektolos^ki zbornik 1, 1956). Most of

it is by Hamm (including the

> lengthy glossary), the chapter on inflection is by Hraste; the

very brief section on phonetics is by

> Guberina. Much about this dialect grammar is worrisome.
>
>
> The authors have not managed to determine whether or not the

dialect has a tonal contrast and in

> which positions it has contrastive vowel quantity. To make up for

that deficiency they present

> their material in a phonetic transcription in which tone and

length are noted impressionistically

> (rather than contrastively, as is traditional). The result is an

immense amount of doublets and a

> complete absence of clarity about the prosodic system, i.e. about

the very subject accentology

> happens to be about. This point alone is a good reason to be

extremely cautious.

>
>
>
> There are systematic discrepancies between Hraste's and Hamm's

contributions. Since they

> cannot both be correct, at least one of them has to be unreliable

in important respects. The

> material Illich-Svitych operates with is limited to Hraste's

chapter, completely lacking parallels in

> the sections written by Hamm.

Oops! The last point *really* sounds dramatic.

>
> Both authors have a problematic track record as dialectologists.

Hamm, who was a specialist on

> medieval texts, had a quite limited dialectological experience.

Hraste is well known for his work

> on the dialects of his native central Dalmatia (Hvar and Brac^),

but his work on dialects further

> away from his native area has a very poor reputation. In 1951

Stjepan Ivs^ic/ took the

> unprecendented step of warning the scholarly public about the

unreliability of Hraste's later work.

> Considering the track record of the two principal authors there is

reason for caution, particularly

> in the case of Hraste.
>
>
>
> What I find most disturbing is that Ill-Sv. appears to have missed

the warning signs that are so

> abundant both in Nemanic/ and in the Susak description. In both

cases you really don't need a

> background in SCr dialectology to realize that something is

terribly wrong.

>
>
>
> [For further discussion see my article in Folia Linguistica

Historica 5/2, 1984 (pp. 358-361) and

> my appendix to the second edition of Werner Lehfeldt's book (2001,

pp. 134-138).]

I feel a growing need to get my hands on that and to catch up on my
reading on the matter in general. Thank you for the valuable input.

Jens