On 2006-09-13 07:15, pielewe wrote:
> The idea that the absence of a formal distinction between Nsg, Asg
> and Vsg could lead to complete loss of inflection strikes me as
> completely fantastic given the Slavic context, particularly because
> in the period involved ordinary msc o-stems did not differentiate
> between Nsg and Asg, so that it is the Vsg that has to carry the
> seeds of the entire process.
How do you know what "the period involved" is? The o-forms are
indeclinable only dialectally. Elsewhere they fall together with
ordinary masculines except in the nom.sg. If o-names were formally
neuter at one time, declinability (with most of the case forms shared
with masculines) is the original state of things, and indeclinability is
a post-PSl. innovation -- one of two possible resolutions of the problem
of semantically masculine but formally neuter nouns. I don't know the
exact dialectal distribution of indeclinable o-names or the textual
evidence for the antiquity of the phenomenon, but I imagine the rise of
the new animate acc.sg. = gen.sg. but different from the nom.sg. could
be an important part of the motivation for indeclinability, which may
have developed independently in different dialects. Speakers on Modern
Polish may still hesitate about the correct acc. and gen. of personal
names in -o like <Fredro> (the current norm is acc. <Fredre,>, gen.
<Fredry>, but two hundred years ago it was still <Fredra> in both
cases); Polish given names like Bolko or Mieszko are declined like
masculines (acc./gen. Bolka), but names and surnames taken from other
Slavic languages may go undeclined (spotkal/em Miro; byl/em tam razem z
Marko; w czasach Tito) -- this is obviously not an archaism but a modern
reenactment of the same scenario.
Piotr