Re: Slavic *-je/o

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

> Similarly in Latv. die~veris. I'm not at all convinced that

*kah2uló- is

> a secure reconstruction or that an intervocalic (and therefore
> syllable-initial) laryngeal was capable of triggering Hirt's Law in

the

> first place. I'd sooner believe in something like *kauh-ló-,

assuming

> that the laryngeal remained consonantal after a semivowel despite

its

> vowel-like behaviour after nasals and liquids (which are lower on

the

> sonority scale), or even in some special stress-attracting

properties of

> roots with inherited "non-laryngeal" *a, which would allow us to
> reconstruct simply *daiwér- and *kauló-.

...and to explain the Balto(-Slavic) acute as well?

How about another well-known example (more in the evening -- don't
have my copy of "Imennaja..." to hand at the moment):
*gWrihwéh2 (OInd. gri:vá: 'neck') > Latv. gri~va 'river mouth', Sl.
*gri"va (a) 'mane' vs. *g(W)(H)olhwéh2 > Lith. galvà (3), Latv.
gal^va 'head'? The laryngeal still remained consonantal after *l at
the time Hirt's Law operated and thus the law failed? But I've got an
impression you insisted the segmental laryngeals didn't survive into
that time?

> It has consequences for the chronology of laryngeal loss. If one

assumes

> the merger of inherited laryngeals with the laryngeal onglide of
> allegedly glottalised stops as the mechanism of Winter's Law, that

means

> that segmental laryngeals should still be present in the system. If

not,

> they may have been lost earlier.

Yes, even though Kortlandt himself dates laryngeal loss so late on
other grounds. After all, he had suggested that laryngeals completely
disappeared from Slavic as late as ca. 800AD before he became aware
of Winter's Law.

> How about verbs like
>
> Lith. klumpù, klùpti vs. klúpau, klúpoti
> Lith. remiù, rem~ti vs. rýmau, rýmoti
>
> cf. also
>
> Latv. gubt vs. gu~ba^tie^s (Slavic *gybati)

I see (though the accentual variants klu:póti ir rémti do exist). But
how whould one demonstrate that a pretonic acute of this kind
attracts stress in Lithuanian? BTW, by and large (analogical
complications and by-variants apart), the distribution of suffixal
vs. root stress in the infinitives in -yti- is quite simple: the root
is stressed if it's acute, and the suffix is stressed otherwise (i.
e. the original columnal root stress in the relevant cases protracted
by Saussure's Law), like in mókyti 'teach' vs. darýti 'make' (I don't
mean that the columnal stress is itself original, but at least this
seems to be the case already at the time of the operation of
Saussure's Law). How would you explain the root stress in mókyti?

Sergei