Re: [tied] Meillet's law

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mandicdavid" <davidmandic@...>
wrote:

> 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.

... of mobile paradigms, yes.

> 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.

But why had it been lost previously?

> Now, the complete loss of accentuation, ie. the rise of

enclinomena,

> must have followed the merger of the ap. b and ap. c,

They weren't a.p. b at the time (and never got to be a.p. b), but yes.

>and this must
> have preceded the transfer of barytone neuter o-stems to masculine.

Yes.

> 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.

Yes.

> I hope I haven't missed anything.

In Slavic accentology, you've always missed something, but the above
seems a valid chronology to me. Recapitulating:
1) loss of acute in mobile paradigms
2) merger of barytone and mobile masculine o-stems
3) rise of enclinomena // barytone o-stem neuters > masculine //
Dybo's law

> 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.

I don't know: post hoc does not always mean propter hoc.

> 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...

I don't know. Jens has said that it was a further polarization of
the accent in mobile paradigms: where the rule had been that the
stress must be on either the first or last syllable, the rule now
became that the stress had to be on the first or the last mora. That
makes sense.

If Kortlandt claims that pretonic acutes were eliminated (and later
tonic acutes in the same paradigm, by analogy), that also makes
sense. In the oxytone paradigms (e.g. peró-neuters, aorist) we also
see elimination of pretonic acutes, but the details of the
developments and the chronologies are difficult to reconcile with
what happened in the mobile forms.

For instance, if we look at the oxytone neuters, I see the following
developments:

short root vowel: remains a.p. b (e.g. peró)

circumflex root vowel: remains a.p. b in closed syllable, becomes
a.p. c in open syllable (e.g. mêN-so, jâ-je)

[The above are the main pillars of my theory about three (not two!)
original Balto-Slavic accent paradigms. I have just thought of the
following, but I don't have my books at hand here in Poland, so this
is tentative:]

acute root vowel: becomes a.p. a in closed syllable (or"d-lo, my"d-
lo), remains a.p. b [acute elimination!] in open syllable (e.g. vê-
dró).