From: pielewe
Message: 44804
Date: 2006-05-30
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Mate Kapoviæ <mkapovic@...> wrote:
On the seNdzic' vs. saNdzisz business:
> Would you agree that this is a big lacuna in Kortlandt's theory? I
mean,
> you've always said one should criticize it from inside a theory.
Honestly I wouldn't be able to say at the moment. (It also depends on
what you call "big".) What FK writes on seNdzic' vs. saNdzisz in the
article you quoted earlier today is not explicit enough for me to
understand what he has in mind, let alone to criticize on other
grounds than lack of explicitness.
By and large, and discounting for the moment the seNdzic' vs.
saNdzisz problem, I think that Kortlandt's theory copes very well
with vowel quantity. However that does not preclude the existence of
thousands of potential theories that can do even better. After all,
vowel quantity has traditionally always been something of the step-
child of Slavic accentology.
Unfortunately there are quite a few issues where he either is overly
secretive and/or expects his readers to do his work. To give an
example, I would dearly like to hear from him how it is possible for
*soNdU to be (b)-stressed and yet for *soNdIja to have stress on the
suffix in the period before Dybo's law. (This is implied in the
passage we're talking about.) According to Dybo's valency theory,
which he claims to follow (unless I have misunderstood something at
some point) this should not be possible. It seems obvious that he
somehow operates with a mitigated variant of Dybo's valency theory,
but he nowhere explains the details.
Accentologists are weirdoes. :)
Best.
Willem