Re: [tied] Meillet's law

> But the question is why was the acute eliminated in these words? It's
> obvious it happened, but what caused it?

I wouldn't say it is so obvious. At least if you do not disregard the
material. Slavic o-stems related to Lith. a. p. 2 are quite tricky.
Sometimes they are a. p. c, sometimes a. p. b, sometimes they belong to a
"mixed"-paradigm (a. p. d).

> 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.

And what's wrong with the assumption the acute intonation was lost in
unstressed syllables and then by analogy in accented as well? The fact
that there were unstressed acute syllables? That seems more reasonable to
assume than unchanged PIE laryngeals...

> 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].
>>
>
>
>