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

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

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

They are both PSl. -i.

> ie PIE *-éi vs *´-i.

PIE *-oih1-s

> > What I don't understand is how the word-final yers could
> > disappear even if they were stressed.

They weren't stressed anymore when they disappeared.

> 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 was indeed the state of affairs _before_ the rise of the yers.
In late Common Slavic, however, former /i:/ and /au/ > /u:/ had been
shortened to /i/ and /u/ in certain contexts, and we had long /i:/,
short /i/ and short lax /I/ (likewise /u:/, /u/, /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,

All /i/ and /u/ were laxed, independently of the place of the stress.

> and with that formulation we need no
> 'reinforcing' of stressed 'jers'

There is no "reinforcing of stressed yers". Yers are strong or weak
according to Havlík's law, which works independently of the place of
the stress. Before Havlík's law, all stressed yers had already lost
the stress to the preceding vowel. Of course, that vowel could be a
yer, so there were still some stressed yers left (there would have to
be, in words with nothing but yers).

In any case, all of this is completely irrelevant to the question of
the Slavic Auslautgesetze, which all happened before the rise of the
yers.