On Tue, 30 May 2006 10:58:15 +0200 (CEST), Mate Kapović
<
mkapovic@...> wrote:
>On Uto, svibanj 30, 2006 12:39 am, Miguel Carrasquer reče:
>
>> I don't think I can accept Holzer's chronology, in any case
>> not where it relates to absolute dates. I don't believe
>> that Slavic <kórljI> has anything to do with Charles Martel
>> or even with Charlemagne (Karl would have given *kórlU).
>
>That is hardly certain. The borrowings are not always subject to strict
>rules. Also, Slavic had /l/ and /l^/ in that period
Which period? That is the question. Slavic didn't have a
phonemic contrast between /l/ and /l^/ until the loss of the
yers. Whether and when there was a phonetic contrast is
anybody's guess. The word *karljI has /lj/.
>, and it is a common
>phenomenon that languages with a "hard" and "soft" l's borrow foreign
>"hard" l as their "soft" l, thus in Turkish and Albanian for example.
>There are also other examples when Romance /l/ > Slavic /l^/, as I seem to
>remember from Holzer's articles.
In his Zagreb article I find one example (Pola > Pűlj), and
several with l = l. A quick scan doesn't reveal any with -l
> -o, but that may be coincidental.
>Anyway, his theory is not at all relying on this word only. It is
>established by numerous attestations of Slavic words in old documents
>(German, Latin, Greek etc.), other loanwords into and from Slavic,
>toponyms etc.
The Charles Martel thing is one of the few links with
absolute chronology. Latin loans in Croatian are another
one, but in view of the data presented in Zagreb by Ranko
Matasovic', I have my doubts about Holzer's conclusions
regarding the dating of Dybo's law.
I don't have Matasovic''s paper handy right now, but as I
recall the gist of it was that Latin feminines were adopted
into a.p. a, while masculines/neuters were adopted into a.p.
b.
Since Latin feminines are never stressed on the -a, a.p. c
is out of the question, and so is a.p. b if Dybo's law had
already worked. The fact that Latin feminines became a.p. a
in Croatian, in spite of their not having anything like
acute accentuation in the source language, shows that Dybo's
law predates the influx of Latin words.
Why masculines/neuters became a.p. b is an interesting
question. The implication is that not only Dybo's law, but
also Ivs^ic''s law (retraction c.q. advancement of stress
from weak yers) predates the contact with the Romans. After
Ivs^ic''s law, all three a.p.'s supply a more or less
correct placing of the ictus for Latin masculines in the
nominative/accusative singular. Apparently, the prosody then
prevails, and the neo-acute is considered to be closer to
the Latin model than either the acute of a.p. a or the
circumflex c.q. stresslessness of a.p. c. Even if that
means un-Latin stress in the oblique forms (the presence of
limited mobility in some Latin categories such as rátio,
ratióne may have helped alleviate that).
Some very old loans from Germanic may predate Dybo's law.
I'm thinking specifically of melkó, which shows its age by
preserving Germanic final -a(z) (reinterpreted as Slavic
neuter -a > -o). But even that is not entirely clear. It
depends on whether there were any neuters ending in
unstressed -a (> -o) at the time.
>You cannot reject the whole theory, which is in my opinion quite
>uncontroversial, just because of *korljI.
There are other reasons, one of them outlined above. In
general, I feel a bit uncomfortable with the implication
that almost nothing happened between Proto-Balto-Slavic (2nd
millennium BC?) and 600 AD, and almost everything happened
between 600 and, say, 1200 AD.
>> I have a chronological problem with the fact that old Polish
>> still had uncontracted forms in the XIV ~ XV centuries, at a
>> time when the accent was already fixed on the initial in
>> _all_ words. If so, that must mean that the accent
>> retraction and the contraction are unrelated phenomena, at
>> least in Lekhitic.
>
>Old Polish has uncontracted endings in *pytajes^I?
As I said, my Polish historical grammar seems to imply that,
without giving much details. I didn't find *pytaje or
anything similar in the Kazania S'wie,tokrzyskie.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...