Dear All,
The jers (Common Slavic reduced vowels) were generally dropped in
word-final position and before non-jer vowels (weak position). Jers
in syllables before a jer in weak position were in strong position,
and were kept; they developed different reflexes in the various
Slavic languages (in Russian "o" for the back jer and "e" for the
front jer).
Prepositions like v, k, s, which contained a jer in Common Slavic,
therefore have doublets vo, ko, so, which arose originally before
words where the first syllable contained a weak jer; in the
contemporary language, these words begin with a consonant cluster
(e.g. son "sleep" - vo sne "in (the) sleep", vo vnimanie "in(to)
consideration"). In cases where such a cluster does not go back to
the loss of an original jer, the doublet without "o" is used (e.g.,
v snegu "in (the) snow").
As the rule is not synchronically transparent, the distribution of
the doublets will not always reflect the loss of an old jer - e.g.,
the word l'od "ice" has moved secondarily to a declination class
with loss of the stem vowel in the non-nom/acc. sg., like son, and
also attracts the preposition doublets with "o": so l'dom "with ice".
Quite often, the doublet with "o" is used in order to avoid a clash
of two identical consonants (when the follwoing noun begins with a
cluster) - e.g., vo vnimanie "in(to) consideration", but k
vnimaniyu "to the attention / for the consideration" (although one
sometimes also finds the historically expected ko vnimaniyu).
Best regards,
Hans-Werner Hatting
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
> <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
> It's the form the hard jer takes when it can't be dropped. The
> difficulties lie in formulating when it can't be dropped, or in
these
> particular cases, what the 'difficult-to-pronounce' clusters are.
> >