Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
> So what is the reason the word was borrowed into Slavic as a
> jo-stem (*korljI)?
First of all, I don't think it was any of the Germanic appellatives that
was borrowed into Slavic; the loan was more probably based on
Charlemagne's name in its Frankish form, i.e. <Karl>, perhaps with some
kind of suffix and/or effects of indirect borrowing.
Second, all the old derivatives of *korljI in Slavic have the extension
*-ev- (*korljev-IskU 'royal', *korljev-itjI 'prince', etc.), which might
be take as indicating an original stem in *-ju- rather than *-jo-. I'm
not sure how to explain it. Perhaps the model was some Franco-Latinate
adjective such as *Car(o)l-eu- ~ *Car(o)l-iu- interpreted as a u-stem by
the Slavic borrowers, but no parallel case occurs to me at the moment.
Another objection against *karl-ja- in Germanic is that after a heavy
syllable we would expect (regularly in a *-ja- stem), Sieversian
*karlija- > pre-OE *kærli: > OE (WSax.) *ci(e)rle, *cyrle, like *andija-
> ende or *xerdija- > hi(e)rde, hyrde. Not that the absence of umlaut
isn't decisive anyway.
The "ablaut" of *e/*a in this word (rather clearly a uniquely Germanic
formation, even if ultimately based on *g^erh2-) strikes me as unlikely
to be inherited. Perhaps *karla-/*karlan- was analogically assimilated
to *erla- in some dialects.
Piotr