--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jens Elmegård Rasmussen <elme@...>
wrote:
> ... one short question just for
> now: Is it a problem that Slavic jo-stem nouns turn up in
Lithuanian
> ending in -ius? For example, Zinkevic^ius to me first-off looks
like
> the reflex of a pre-Proto-Slavic Ausgang *-ju-s from *-jo-s
parallel
> to *-u(s) from *-os. Is there a different way to handle this?
No idea.
I'm not aware of a thorough and methodologically well-founded
discussion of the problem of the reflexes of word-final *os and
related sequences (*om etc.). When I was working on it fifteen years
ago in the context of the Novgorod/Pskov problem I was astonished by
the way much of the evidence is just ignored by most scholars (the
way I've never heard about the Zinkevic^ius argument until today) and
also by the way nearly everybody ignores nearly everybody else's
work, basically causing the subject to run around in circles like a
young dog trying to catch its own tail, and at best to reinvent
itself constantly.
Since then I've become more cynical, mainly as a consequence of my
study of the progressive palatalization, where the same effects can
be observed. The most urgent problems in Slavic historical
linguistics have to do with communication. Literature in some
languages just is not read. There is a general feeling that anything
written in any of the Slavic languages or in German, French or
English is accessible to anyone interested in Slavic historical
grammar. That has never been true. The most important publications
about the progressive palatalization are by Meillet (hence in French)
and in the West Slavic languages Polish and Czech. Those publications
just have not been read, they are not part of the basic literature.
as if Meillet, Lehr-Splawinski and Zubaty/ are obscure names, for
crying out loud. In addition the megaphones of the Prague School have
highjacked the discussion, although it is clear to anybody that
Trubetzkoy and (even more clearly) Jakobson, whatever their immense
merits in some respects, simply were not sufficiently grounded in
Slavic historical grammar to be able to talk about it with authority.
There has never been a single handbook that has managed to give the
relevant information that was available in 1910, let alone the
information that is available now, or rather: unavailable because it
is buried in articles written in a dozen languages published in
journals and festschriften and nobody is in a position to know where
to look. Under such circumstances accumulation of knowledge becomes a
mirage.
Best, W.