--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Mate Kapoviæ <mkapovic@...> wrote:
>
> On Pon, sijeèanj 15, 2007 7:58 pm, mandicdavid reèe:
> > Does anyone know of an explanation for the lack of an acute mobile
> > accentual paradigm in Slavic other than the acute-to-circumflex
> > metatony and Kortlandt's theory involving a gradual loss of the
reflex
> > of the PIE laringeals?
>
> Kortlandt's theory should be more acceptable in traditional terms:
the
> acute is eliminated in pretonic (and posttonic syllables), thus
also in a.
> p. c. Enclinomena-forms have the accent by analogy to forms with
pretonic
> accent.
> Jens of course preferes to think of Meillet's law as a tendency to
> polarize the accent in Slavic by which *sy´´nU becomes *sy^nU
because
> *sy'ynU > *s'yynU. In this way, the accent is on the absolute first
mora
> and Meillet's law can be related to Vasiljev-Dolobko's law and the
rise of
> enclinomena-forms.
>
What do you mean by 'pretonic accent'?
If 'acute' means 'long and rising' (or any other sort of tone) the
loss of it in any case has to be considered a movement of the
intonational peak within a syllable. But the question is what caused
it.
As far as I know, according to Kortlandt 'acute' syllables weren't
characterised by a special tone but by the presence of a phoneme, the
reflex of the PIE laryngeals. In that case, such an analogy would
have been very probable.
On the other hand, the loss of phonologic stress might have arisen
quite a long time ago in APc 'barytone' forms - even before the rise
of distinctive tone, while the reflex of the laryngeals was still a
phoneme. In that case this phoneme would have disappeared in all
contexts at the same time, leaving a say rising tone in stressed
syllables only. I'm not quite sure of this but it seems an
interesting supposition.
The 'laryngeal' must have existed at some time because the acute
couldn't have evolved directly from the vowel length alone - compare
e.g. tra:vá, or m^e:so
Is there any evidence that may show a development like this isn't
plausible?
David