Re: Meillet's law

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Mate Kapoviæ <mkapovic@...> wrote:

>
> > 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).

But I was talking about the mobile paradigm.

> > 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...

I think so too. However, what I was trying to say is that the
assumption that acute (or a laryngeal) was first lost in unstressed
syllables and then by analogy in stressed ones is more plausible than
the one according to which acute (or laryngeal) was lost everywhere
at the same time. What I think is that there weren't any tonal
distinctions in unstressed syllables at the time of the Meillet's law.