Re: [tied] Some accentological thoughts...

On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:34:38 +0100, "Mate Kapovic"
<mkapovic@...> wrote:

>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"...

The thing is that if I look at the (admittedly incomplete)
inventory in Derksen's list, there are 13 non-neuter
polysyllabic a.p. b nouns. It's a small sample, but it must
be significant that 11(!) of them have a yer in the first or
second syllable (arImU/arImo, orIlU, ostInU, osIlU, otIcI,
ovInU, ovIsU, pêsUkU, pI(c/k)UlU/pI(c/k)Ulo, bIc^ela,
vIdova). The only non-yer forms are <esétrU>/<esétra>
"sturgeon" and <z^ivótU> "life (etc.)". Feminine <esétra>
looks like a.p. a to me (SCr. <jèsetra>, Bulg. <esétra>).
I don't know how significant the C^akavian variant
<z^ivo``t>, <z^ivo``ta> is (it could simply be analogical
after the normal columnal pattern where the stress has been
advanced to the interior by Dybo's law: <gotóvU>, <oNtróba>,
etc.). At the moment, I have no explanation for the pattern
<esétrU>, G. <esetrá> and <z^ivótU>, G. <z^ivotá>.

>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.

So what do you think of 3sg. -e: as a possible explanation
of thematic lengthening?

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
miguelc@...