--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Sergejus Tarasovas" <S.Tarasovas@...>
wrote:
> The absence (presence) of Vsg in *-ju with the *jo-stems in
> Novgorod/Pskov Slavic would corroborate (weaken) your theory.
Yea, I'm aware of it and have thought about it a lot. Quite obviously
(I guess you must have realized that) it would *not* constitute a
strict refutation because Novgorod/Pskov Slavic did not eliminate the
distinction between the Vsg and the Nsg as such. It eliminated the
distinction in a specific inflectional paradigm because the available
alternatives (retaining *o, importing *U) would have been worse and
because the jo-stems (with -e/-e) provided a convenient morphological
model. Theoretically it is possible that the same innovation that took
place elsewhere (importing -u from the u-stems) reached Novgorod/Pskov
too, eventually. But I can't deny that I would be surprised if the jo-
stem Vsg would turn out to be -u.
Note that the importation of -u into the jo-stem paradigm acquired a
motivation only after the loss of final -s, hence in the same general
period as the rise of the Novgorod/Pskov Nsg in -e took place on my
scenario. We are not entitled to put it earlier.
> This
> morhological position was still (conveniently) absent from the
material
> in the end of 1994, when Zaliznjak was finishing the first version
> of "Drevnenovgorodskij dialekt". I haven't got the revised edition of
> 2004 or other later publications to hand and can't check.
To the best of my knowledge it has not yet surfaced in the materal, cf.
the second edition: "V mjagkom variante zasvidetel'stvovany tol'ko
osnovy na *c* [which are irrelevant because they have -e everywhere in
Slavic, W.V.] ... Kakim bylo okonchanie dlja prochix mjagkix osnov ...,
neizvestno" (p. 105).
Best, Willem