On 2007-01-22 22:21, tgpedersen wrote:
> Specifically: How can a stressed vowel become a jer? Jers are ghosts
> of departed (well, departing) vowels. Vanishing is what *un*stressed
> vowels do.
Reduced is not necessarily the same thing as unstressed. There are many
Slavic words with no other vowels but jers (*pIsU 'dog', *mUxU 'moss',
*sUnU 'sleep, dream', *krUvI 'blood (acc.)', *dInI 'day' etc.). In such
cases one of the jers is reinforced phonologically, yielding a full
vowel again. The quality of that vowel varies dialectally (cf. OCS sUnU,
Bulg. s&n [with a central shwa-type vowel!], SCr. san, Russ. son,
Pol./Cz./Slk. sen) and it often disappears in inflected word-forms and
derivatives:
*pIsU, gen. *pIsa > Pol. pies, psa
*pIsUkU (dimin.), gen. *pIsUka > OPol. psek, pieska (> Mod.Pol. piesek,
pieska)
Piotr