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

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

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@> wrote:
> >
> > 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)
>
>
> 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.
> This probably has something to do with metrical properties of words
> in PSl.

cf Russian derz^í!, vs búd'!, PSl *-í vs *´-I, ie PIE *-éi vs *´-i.
Since the two forms are related by stress-induced ablaut, the
variation must go back to PIE (and impv *-éi-/*´-i- is threfore PIE,
and traditionally assumed *-dhi- is impv. of *dhe:- as aux. verb. in
perifrastic composition.

> 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.

I think there is something methodologically wrong with a language with
'normal' and 'supershort' vowels. Aren't linguists backprojecting the
present state of affairs onto PSlav. (or even to ChSl.)? How about
renaming them 'long' and 'short' as they are named in any other
language with two vowel lengths, which would make PSlav i/u into i:/u:
and I/U into i/u? That means stressed 'jers' (I question-mark them
now, they are i/u) were not reduced to ghostly I/U, like the
unstressed ones were, and with that formulation we need no
'reinforcing' of stressed 'jers' (and that saves us one step forth and
one step back).


Torsten