Re: Slavic ptc.praes.act.

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

I had written:

> > The southward
> > spread of the Novgorod system to embrace all of Russian is in a
> > line
> > with the general tendency of morphological simplifications that
> > arose
> > in Novgorod to spread southward.
> >


Then Torsten wrote:


> With trade? What happened after Novgorod was conquered?



Most of the details have to be guessed at, but basically the
following happened:


(1) The Novgorod dialect lost most of its quirks, which survived only
on the rural periphery if at all. The process is now known to have
started before the middle of the twelfth century, in other words long
before Novgorod was incorporated by Moscovy. The earliest
manifestations of a tendency to avoid the most glaring Novgorodisms
can be found in correspondence involving the Prince, who, it must be
recalled, was part of a family and an administrative structure that
had their focus in Kiev. Most of the birchbark letters that show this
were discovered as recently as 1998 in Novgorod. Before that year it
was known that in at least from the second half of the twelfth
century onwards people tended to avoid certain Novgorodisms in formal
situations, but the social contexts in which that tendency had arisen
was unknown and had to be guessed at. We can now see it actually
happening in the correspondence of people (pure-bred Novgorodians
operating in Novgorod) handling the Prince's correspondence.


(2) Compared with the rest of East Slavic, Novgorod had a simplified
morphology. Quite a few of the simplifications appear to have crept
southward, presumably simply due to the fact that they were
simplifications. Examples:


-- loss of the stem-final alternations due to the Second
Palatalization (e.g. ruka/ruce^, reku/reci): in Novgorod the Second
Palatalization never took place, so there were no alternations;


-- loss of the vocative: Novgorod had no distinct vocative in
masculine nouns in a consonant;


-- in the active present participle replacement of the type "nesa"
with "nesja";


-- in the imperative replacement of the type "nese^te" with "nesite".


W.