Re: [tied] Some accentological thoughts...

On Pon, veljača 26, 2007 10:35 pm, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal reče:

> 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, pęsUkU, pI(c/k)UlU/pI(c/k)Ulo, bIc^ela,
> vIdova).

Sure, but what many adjectives in *-enU, *-elU, *-okU like Croat. ze`len,
zele`na, zele`no, de`beo, debe`la, debe`lo, viso`k, viso`ka, viso`ko etc.
There are tons of adjectives like this.
Of course, these are not the only examples, there is a fairly common type
pokróv, pokrová in East Slavic, cf. also Croat. dial. i`stok, isto`ka
"east", toponym Za`gvozd, Zagvo`zda etc.

> The only non-yer forms are <esétrU>/<esétra>
> "sturgeon" and <z^ivótU> "life (etc.)". Feminine <esétra>
> looks like a.p. a to me (SCr. <jčsetra>, Bulg. <esétra>).

It's the same thing as *got'ovU, yeah.

> 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.).

Most certainly secondary for živo``t, života``.

> 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?

I didn't quite get the argument but long -e: is a *-ě in Slavic. *-e is
supposed to be short. The whole deal with the length in final open
syllables is fishy since you cannot get any general rules, you have to
suppose a lot of analogies in every possible theory.
Thematic *-e- was lengthened in some Slavic dialects, perhaps only localy
in a later period, perhaps already in Common Slavic period (after the
re-establishment of distinctive length on all new vowels) in the stretch
from Posavina till present-day Slovakia and Czech Republic.