Re: [tied] Some lengthened vowel Slavic verbs

From: Mate Kapović
Message: 45092
Date: 2006-06-24

On Sub, lipanj 24, 2006 12:58 pm, Miguel Carrasquer reče:
> On Sat, 24 Jun 2006 10:58:35 +0200 (CEST), Mate Kapović
> <mkapovic@...> wrote:

>>> My preliminary conclusion is
>>> that it does: the verbal category itself can be traced back
>>> to PIE times rather solidly (and Jens has provided a
>>> rationale for the presence of the long vowel). If the long
>>> vowel is inherited from PIE, then the fact that ga"ziti,
>>> pa"riti and va"diti are a.p. a can only be explained if this
>>> lengthened vowel indeed yields a Balto-Slavic acute.
>>
>>Where is the proof for the PIE lengthened grade for these Slavic verbs?
>
> For these three in particular, LIV only gives a non-Slavic
> cognate within the same category for *wedhh1-, namely Greek
> o:théo: (*wo:dh(h1)éye-). If we take a wider look and
> compare all (24, 12 given as "certain") entries in LIV of
> alleged long-vowelled iterative-causatives, I found that
> there are just enough Slavic, Baltic and non-Balto-Slavic
> correspondences to overcome my initial skepticism. Your
> mileage may vary.

OK, so va´´diti could be a genuine case of PIE lengthened grade. But it
could be a new BSl lengthened grade as well, not having direct
correspondence to Greek o:théo:.

>>> Lith. me:sa`, Latv. mi`esa, Slavic me^Nso
>>> (*me:m-sóm),
>>
>>Lithuanian me.sa` is possibly a Slavic loanword or a word influenced by
>>Slavic (Fraenkel), thus not the best evidence. Slavic męso is mobile and
>>thus irrelevant.
>
> I beg to disagree. The question is *why* are meNso and jaje
> mobile? My answer is: precisely _because_ they had a
> circumflex root diphthong in an open syllable in pretonic
> position (a.p. II meN~sa' > a.p. c meN~sa).

I fail to see why. You probably think that the acute would attract the
accent? I don't see why... The jablUko example is not convincing (it's
just *ja´´blU, -o > *ja´´bl-Uko with the retention of the same accent in
the derivative).

>>>Latv. sŕ:ls (*sa:ls),
>>
>>I cannot accept long PIE *a: of non-laryngeal origin, but we've discussed
>>this before.
>
> Yes. In any case the presence or absence of a laryngeal is
> irrelevant, as *sah2l(s) would give exactly the same result
> as *sa:l(s) (cf. a:-stem acc. sg. -ah2m, which also gives a
> circumflex diphthong).

*seh2ls would yield the acute. That's communis opinio. PIE non-laryngeal
*a: is not generally accepted as well as the claim that PIE non-laryngeal
*V: yield BSl acute.

>>> guňvs (*gWo:us). But when a (non-resonant) consonant
>>> follows, we have Latv. năss, năsi (*na:ss, *nasm.),
>>
>>The same as with the 'salt' word.
>
> Well, no: "nose" has a Latvian Dehnton (acute), so there's a
> difference.

I meant, it's the same thing in the PIE reconstruction. I would again
hesitate to reconstruct *na:s with a non-laryngeal *a:.

>>Many of those examples are indeed mobile and irrelevant, that is true.
>> But
>>not all. Cf. Czech c^ára, Ukr. c^ará with the exact parallel in Avestan
>>c^a:ra:. There are more examples like this, but Kortlandt as usual gives
>>only hints and one has to look for the examples by himself.
>
> Could you give the (other) examples you have?

Unfortunately not. I haven't checked all the examples - Kortlandt only
provides hints, as I said, together with a bunch of irrelevant examples.
The trick is to look for a. p. b in Slavic that can be related to a PIE
lengthened grade. A. p. c is inconclusive due to the possibility of the
operation of Meillet's Law. Also, one should look for an outside BSl
evidence for PIE lengthened grade, since otherwise it might be a case of a
newer BSl lenghtened grade and that might have been treated in a different
way.

It just might be that if we exclude the examples like akmuo~ and gu`ovs,
one is left with only a few relevant cases. And here again, you have
*c^a:r'a but *va´´diti. The question of what PIE lengthened grade yielded
might be pretty irrelevant in the end.

Mate