On 2007-01-29 04:55, tgpedersen wrote:
> The Russian ko mné, k tebé thing fascinated me for its similarity to
> PIE secondary 1sg -om vs 3sg -t (vowel / no vowel), so I looked up the
> CSl equivalent. And it's
>
> A mIne,, tebe,
> I mUnojo,, tobojo,
> L mIne,, tebe,
> (but
> D mene tebe)
>
> What a cop-out. I thought I was going to get an explanation of the
> very un-Havlík variation in the designation of heavy syllables before
> nasals vs stops, but no, the designers of OCS introduced a jer / full
> vowel distinction between the pronouns of 1st vs 2(and 3)sg, probably
> to explain this very phenomenon. Anybody who can explain what really
> went on here?
First, the forms you quote are not quite correct. They should be:
acc. meN/mene teN/tebe
gen. mene tebe
dat. mIne^/mi tebe^/ti
ins. mUnojoN tobojoN
loc. mIne^ tebe^
It seems that the front vowels are original and the back ones in the
instrumental are due to some kind of umlaut-like assimilation. There are
occasional contaminated variants like the rarer dat. mUne^ beside mIne^,
and cf. dat./loc. tobe^ in much of North Slavic (Pol. tobie, Ukr. tobi,
Cz. tobe^).
The enclitic forms of the dative (mi, ti) are archaic, though the vowel
is a bit problematic if they come from *moi, *toi (see Miguel's latest
posts). So are the monosyllabic forms of the accusative (meN, teN), cf.
IIr. *ma:m, *twa:m, which are extended variants of old enclitic *me,
*t(w)e (possibly preserved in Old Polish), whereas the disyllabic forms
are borrowed from the genitive.
The stem teb- resulted from the reanalysis of the old dative
*t(w)e-bH(e)i. The *b < *bH crept into other case forms, e.g. gen. *téwe
> tebe
The yer in the 1sg. results from the accentually conditioned treatment
of the secondary nasal stem *men- extracted from the reanalysed gen.
*méne (and perhaps acc. meN). Strong/weak vowel alternation (e/I) may
have been more natural before a sonorant than before an obstruent, but
note also such variants as OCS c^eso ~ c^Iso.
Piotr