Re: Slavic endings

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

>
> 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 "period involved" is the period preceding the rise of the use of
the Gsg instead of the Asg on any scale. In OCS and the earliest Old
Russian that still is a pretty limited phenomenon.

> The o-forms are
> indeclinable only dialectally.

In the absence of serious parallels I can't accept the possibility
that formally neuter nouns could spontaneously lose their entire
inflection merely on the basis of the Vsg. Since the paradigm without
declension is anomalous, it has to be archaic. The renewed completion
of the indeclinable paradigms is a trivial innovation.

Piotr:

> 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.

I'm sorry, Piotr, but please, have a heart. So far we don't know if
the scenario involving spontaneous loss of inflection is possible at
all and now you want us to believe that it took place independently
in different dialects. And what can be the relevance of the
inflection of borrowings in modern Polish to a process that is held
to have taken place in the inherited lexicon of Common Slavic?
Indeclinability in borrowings just is not "reenactment of the same
scenario".

Best, Willem