Re: [tied] Re: Balto-Slavic C-stems / long vowel endings

On 2007-01-23 17:05, mandicdavid wrote:

> Not all yers became 'weak'. First they became lax (similar to English
> vowels in 'big' and 'pull'). Later some of them shifted to e/o (cf.
> the development of Latin short i and u) or schwa, which in some
> languages subsequently yielded a.
> The rest of them disappeared. Something similar happened in some
> Croatian dialects, where the short i is frequently reduced or
> dropped: vid (2sg imperative: look!) etc.

It's the same in Polish. One extreme case is *vUz-Imi (Russ. voz'mí) >
wez'mi > wez'm > wez' meaning 'take!', where the palatalisation of the
final consonant of the "stranded" prefix is the only synchronic trace of
the verb root.

> This probably has something to do with metrical properties of words
> in PSl.

There's a phenomenon known as Havlík's Law, operating to a varying
extent in the separate languages: if there's a sequence of open
syllables containing jers, every other jer is dropped beginning with the
last one (if final of followed by a syllable containing a full vowel).
In Old Polish Havlík's Law operated very regularly, producing
odd-looking alternations like *xrIbItU/*xrIbIta > chrzbiet ~
grzbiet/chrzepta 'back, ridge', for the most part levelled out in Modern
Polish (grzbiet/grzbietu).

> The stressed yer weren't 'weak' - they were ordinary lax vowels.
>
> What I don't understand is how the word-final yers could disappear
> even if they were stressed.

First, stress was retracted from them in accordance with the trochaic
prominence pattern that operated in strings of reduced syllables.
There's something not unlike Havlík's Law in the treatment of French
schwa, which also has this tendency towards alternate loss and
reinforcement.

Piotr