Re: [tied] Meillet's law

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mcarrasquer" <miguelc@...> wrote:

>
> --- 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.

But the question is why was the acute eliminated in these words? It's
obvious it happened, but what caused it?
In the period just before the elimination of acute in a.p. c there
must have existed stems with both acute and circumflex first
syllable. Then the acute became circumflex for some unknown reason -
and according to your theory, not only in the barytone forms, but
also in the oxytone ones.
Kortlandt explains the loss of acute a.p.c stems as an analogy to the
oxytone forms, where the glottal stop had been lost previously. A
development like this seems to be more likely than the disappearance
of acute everywhere at the same time.

Now, the complete loss of accentuation, ie. the rise of enclinomena,
must have followed the merger of the ap. b and ap. c, and this must
have preceded the transfer of barytone neuter o-stems to masculine.
The latter change affected certain old Germanic loans which means
that the above-mentioned merger must have been carried through rather
early.

Since the ap.a nouns didn't become mobile there can't have been any
acute ap.c nouns at that time. So, the loss of acute in ap.c preceded
this merger, and all the afore-mentioned changes. In other words, it
must have been rather old. Older than the Dybo's Law as well.

I hope I haven't missed anything.

The question is - is the rise of enclinomena the result of the loss
of acute mobile type, or the converse?
According to what I've written above, it's clear that the elimination
of the pitch/tonal opposition in ap.c somehow incited the subsequent
loss of phonemic accent in the barytone forms.

However, there's also Holzer's chronology, where Meillet's Law (the
loss of acute in ap.c, and elsewhere as well) is dated to a rather
late period.

And we still have the question why the acute became circumflex...

> 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].
>