--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Mate Kapoviæ <mkapovic@...> wrote:
>
> On Èet, sijeèanj 18, 2007 3:57 pm, mcarrasquer reèe:
> > My point is that, even before Pedersen's law (i.e. the transfer of
> > mobility to the V-stems) and Hirt's law (which I had hitherto
> > considered to be the oldest Balto-Slavic soundlaws),
>
> Don't you need it to be old if you relate it to laryngeal breaking?
I haven't changed my mind about the absolute antiquity of Hirt's law.
The only change affects the relative order, where I had Hirt's law
second, and I now have it third, because of the insertion of the long-
vowel rule at the very begin.
To return to Meillet's law: the question I had been avoiding (e.g. in
my paper read in Copenhagen) is whether Meillet's law is about the
elimination of the acute from mobile paradigms or about the total
loss of accentuation in barytone forms of mobile paradigms (the rise
of so-called "enclinomena"). I have stated before that Meillet's law
was blocked by Slaaby-Larsen's law, i.e. by the presence of a closed
syllable. This explains the accentuation of the present tense of "to
be", and the l-participle of C-verbs, which were both affected by
Dybo's law, despite the fact that we would have expected these
paradigms to be mobile and immune to Dybo's law by
their "enclinomenicity". However, as evidenced by the other athematic
verbs (with an acute stem): êd-, dad-, vêd- (2sg. êsí, dasí, vêsí),
Slaaby-Larsen's law did not block the acute-eliminating aspect of
Meillet's law, merely the enclinomena-producing aspect of it. The
mêNso-law, which causes end-stressed paradigms with circumflex
intonation in the root (provided the syllable is open) to become
mobile, also indicates that the circumflex that remained after the
elimination of acutes from mobile paradigms was a _real_ circumflex,
otherwise the analogical shift of meN~só to mêNso (after e.g. gol~vá,
gôlvoN) would not have taken place. I also agree with Kortlandt that
the merger of non-acute barytone masculine o-stems with the mobile
masculine o-stems proves that there was no prosodic distinction
between the barytone forms of mobile paradigms (in the whole a.p. c
singular and the NApl.) and the non-acute barytones (pre-Dybo a.p.
a), otherwise the merger would not have taken place.
This means that there are two separate phenomena: (1) the elimination
of acutes from mobile paradigms (not just from the barytone forms,
but from the oxytone forms as well), and (2) the loss of independent
accentuation on barytone forms of mobile paradigms (rise of
enclinomena). (1) obviously comes before (2), and (2) comes before
Dybo's law [and was blocked by Slaaby-Larsen's law, that is to say,
if the accented syllable was closed, it remained accented].