--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Mate Kapoviæ <mkapovic@...> wrote:
> I think it is big when the whole deal about pretonic length and
Dybo's Law
> crashes down, but OK...
I for one would need quite a bit of convincing that the points at
issue necessarily imply a "crash".
I had said:
> > 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.
Then Mate said:
> He should be explicit though if he wants people to accept his
theories.
It goes without saying that I agree with that.
But we should never forget all the same that Slavic accentology (and
Slavic historical phonology in general) has a long history of
miscommunications and of valuable results falling by the wayside just
because they happened not to be welcome or nice or to be expressed in
the right way by the right person at the right time in the right
language. After all what Stang did in his 1957 book was more than
anything else a job of resurrecting old results that had been ignored
or shouted out of existence by scholars who appear to have been more
interested in scoring debating points and getting their way than in
the truth. That is one reason why my criticism of the Moscow School
(in the second edition of Werner Lehfeldt's Introduction) is written
the way it is: I wanted to draw attention to a number of difficulties
without my text serving as an excuse for readers just to reject the
whole Moscow building. I am deeply convinced that it is often more
profitable to keep flawed results in circulation than to have to
reinvent them at a later stage. If I sound like an old codger here
you have to realize that I *am* an old codger.
(Actually to be honest I do think I understand full well what
Kortlandt is doing here, but I also think that it is his
responsibility and not mine to clarify his intentions.)
[...]
Mate:
> ... nobody's actually looked at all the material carefully. Stang
> was on the right way but he has not payed much attention to the
details.
> Kortlandt's mistake was that he took modern standard language data
for
> granted.
I can only say that this does not do justice either to Stang or to
Kortlandt. I vividly recall that when Kortlandt was working on his
accentology back in the early seventies intricate dialectal data were
very much on his (and everybody's) mind. A few years earlier the
Amsterdam accentologists (Ebeling c.s.) had combed the entire
literature searching for dialect descriptions that were solid and
reliable enough to build on. There are two big problems: that of
deciding what is and what is not reliable and the problem posed by
the presence of relatively recent phenomena that have not been
inventoried, let alone sorted out. Croatian dialectology in
particular was in a lamentable state at the time. Although internal
facts sufficed to see that the well-known Susak description (of 1956)
was profoundly flawed and although many people must have known about
that, nobody in Croatia had the courage to say so publicly. At the
same time publication of the Vrgada dictionary by Blaz^ Juris^ic^ was
constantly being delayed with feeble excuses. (In both cases Mate
Hraste was crucially implicated.) The Susak study in addition to
being of doubtful value in itself, gave rise to a tradition of
neglecting contrastiveness in descriptive work, which culminated in
the Z^irje description (1968, needless to say published in the Hraste
issue of "Rasprave ..."), a piece of research that reads like a
malevolent parody. Signs of what sometimes looked like deliberate
incompetence were all over the place. To this, the workings of
Murphy's Law should be added. Death prevented Petar Skok from
continuing the description of his native dialect of Jurkovo Selo in
Z^umberak beyond the phonology. Zvonimir Junkovic, who hailed from
the most archaic section of the Kajkavian dialect area (at the time
very poorly documented), chose not to write a grammar of that dialect
but to dabble in Slavic accentology with results that have been
universally regarded as embarrassing. Need I go on? Faced with this
pretty picture, outsiders had no option but to excercize extreme care
(which, needless to see, may impress one as exaggerated with the
benefit of hindsight).
Best,
Willem