Re: [tied] Re: trzymac'

From: Mate Kapović
Message: 44791
Date: 2006-05-30

On Uto, svibanj 30, 2006 11:09 am, pielewe reče:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Mate Kapović <mkapovic@...> wrote:
>
>> ... my theory is corroborated by the development in
>> Polish. Old Polish has, for instance, the expected seNdzic' "judge" -
>> saNdzisz (a. p. b), which has been transformed analogically to Modern
>> Polish saNdzic' - saNdzisz. In order to explain that, Kortlandt
> assumes
>> some imaginary suffix *-Ij-, which has dissapeared and who knows what.
>> That is the clear example that his theory just does not work and his
>> critique is futile.
>
>
>
> That is a misunderstanding. Kortlandt does not talk about the
> alternation of seNdzic' vs. saNdzisz, but about the accentuation of the
> noun meaning 'judge', i.e. *soNdIji, which does have the suffix *-Ij-.
> As far as I know (but I may be mistaken), the alternation seNdzic' vs.
> saNdzisz is not treated anywhere in his work. Indeed I vividly recall
> him saying at some point in the mid seventies that he felt that that
> was the only more or less serious problem in Slavic accentology his
> theory failed to account for. Of course I am not in a position to tell
> whether or not he would still say that today.

It's not a misunderstanding. Cf.
http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art222e.pdf

Side 15 (his IWoBA 1 contribution). Kortlandt is forced to reconstruct an
some imaginary form *soNdIjiti or something like that in order to explain
what is regular in my theory.

I am afraid that is not just a minor problem, it is a clear indication
that Kortlandt's whole theory on pretonic length is false (its relation to
Dybo's Law etc.). There is just no way to explain Slovincian, Old Polish,
Kajkavian and Molise Croatian data with it. These dialects preserve the
old pattern of short (pretonic) vowel in the a. p. b infinitive, but a
long (neo-acute) vowel in the present tense. This cannot be an innovation,
while the long vowel in the infinitive (as found in Modern Polish, Czech,
Slovak, Croatian etc.) is easily explained by the analogy to the present
tense. And this is not just a construct since this secondary introducing
of length to the infinitive is clear in the historical development of
Polish and it is also seen synchronically in Kajkavian, where some
dialects have generalized length, and some do not.

Mate