On 2006-09-05 22:30, Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:
> <víenas>/<vie^ns> is of course
> problematic (someone should devote a monograph to the PIE numeral
> 'one'!) but I don't think we can say anything sensible about its
> accentual evolution before we fully understand its morphological
> structure (I can't say I understand it well).
Another case of an acuted u-diphthong that failed to trigger Hirt's Law
is Lith. jáunas, Latv. jau^ns, Slavic (c)-accented *junU. It's certainly
somehow derived from the Hoffmann compound *h2jú-h3on- (Ved. yúvan-),
but the PIE reconstruction *h2je/ou-Hn-o- (see Derksen) is ad hoc, looks
odd (it might be a vr.ddhi formation but lacks cognates or parallels),
and still leaves some doubt as to the non-applicability of Hirt's Law in
this case. Ordinary thematicisation would have produced *h2juh3n-ó-.
Traditionally, this would have given PBSl. **juhnó- > **jú:no- (Hirt),
but it has been argued on this list (Miguel) that *h3 caused the
"laryngeal breaking" (rising diphthongisation) of high vowels in
Balto-Slavic (*ih3, *uh3 > *j&, *w& (no Hirt) > *i:, *u:, cf. Latv.
dzi^vs < *gWih3wós). Let's therefore imagine that the pre-Hirt form was
*jVw&nó-, with a prop-vowel inserted to break up the unpronounceable
initial cluster of two glides. This would have led to *jaw&ná- (no Hirt)
> *ja:uná- at a later date.
Piotr