Re: Balto-Slavic C-stems / long vowel endings

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

>
> >
> > What have oxytone neuters to do with the verbal 1sg.?
> > The 1sg. did not have final -m in PIE, and it can't have had -m

in

> > Balto-Slavic because that would have given Slavic -U, not -oN.
>
>
> How do you explain -y in present participles: bery...?

I dexplained them yesterday, I think...

A similar case is the nt-participle Nsg., where in part of Slavic we
have an early reduction of *-onts to *-ans, N/s-raising to *-uNh,
lengthening to *-u:Nh, and finally CS -y (e.g. OCS nesy). In Northern
Slavic, on the other hand, we have forms without such an early
reduction. There we have the development *-ants > *-aNts (for which
cf. e.g. 3pl. past *-ont > -oN), and only then (after the N- and s-
raising laws had stopped working) lengthening to *-a:Nh, yielding -a
(e.g. ORuss. nesa).

> > > Slavic vodá might be backformed as a
> > > singular (hence the mysterious f.) from the regular *vódy <-
> > *wódo:ns.
>
> That's more likely than *wodo:r > voda.

It isn't likely at all. How could a nominative in -y be interpreted
as a genitive, when -y is a perfectly normal nominative ending (of
masculine n-stems and feminine uH-stems).

>Wouldn't o: be raised to u: then, cf. mati < má:te:r?

<Mati> and <mote.~> are from *máh2te~.

> The neuter ending -o comes from pronominal *-od. It
> > was first transferred to the adjectives (also Lith. neuter adj.
> -a), then to nouns (not only oxytones: slo``vo is a.p. c, lê"to
> is a.p. a).
>
> It might also have come from -o, which appeared as an analogy to
> other neuter stems -u, -i etc.

Highly unlikely. Such a phenomenon isn't seen anywhere, not even in
languages that have comparatively frequent cases of neuter i- and u-
stems. In Balto-Slavic, I guess the number of neuter i- and u-stems
can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Off-hand, I can only think
of medU and morje.

> Is the barytonesis of lêto a result of Hirt's law?

IIRC, Illich-Svitych compares it to a Germanic word with initial
stress (i.e. with /þ/). In that case, no.