From: tgpedersen
Message: 47099
Date: 2007-01-23
>Why o -> e?
> 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 ofWhen they tried to teach me Russian I made up my own version 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 First, stress was retracted from them in accordance with the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.