Re: [tied] Some accentological thoughts...

From: Mate Kapovic
Message: 47615
Date: 2007-02-26

Miguel said:
 
I was trying various queries against Derksen's Slavic
Inherited Lexicon, and I noticed some trisyllabic a.p. b
words which may be relevant to the question of which came
first: Dybo's law or the retraction of the ictus from weak
yers (Ivs^ic''s law). The words in question are bIc^elá
"bee" and vIdová "widow". Now, I believe that before Dybo's
law, Proto-Slavic had no non-acute interior stressed
syllables. Words had either fixed stress (a.p. I) on the
first syllable (or acute stress on an interior syllable:
jeNzy"kU, kopy"to, etc.), or were mobile (a.p.'s II and
III), with stress on the first or the last syllable (II and
III were in complementary distribution: where III had
initial stress (meN~so, ne``soN), II had final (peró, idóN),
and vice-versa (meNsá, neses^í vs. péra, ídes^I)).
Therefore, the proto-forms cannot have been *bIc^éla and
*vIdóva.
 
> Why not? There are no real arguments in "I believe there was no non-acute interior stressed syllables"...
 
I have the vague feling that
I've seen something somewhere about a 2pl. -ete:, but
perhaps I'm wrong.
 
> Slovene has a neo-circumflex in 1. and 2. pl. and dual.
 
I thought I was smart, and had come up
with the idea that the peculiar shortening in Czech kráva,
Gpl. krav may also be due to neo-circumflex metatony, but
Dybo already says that in "Osnovy".
> That's actually ancient (Czech krav ~ Croat. kra^va:, Slovene kra^v) but it does not solve anything since it's pretty much the only example of a neo-circumflex in Czech. Saying the length is caused by a long yer is just obscurum per obscurius.
 
 Mate