Re: Brugmann's Law

I have a Serbian friend who tells me that Serbian is
conservative mainly at the text book level but that
the spoken language is much less complex and closer to
Bulgarian. He says Slovenian is much more complex and
seems like an "antiquated" form of Serbian. But that's
just hi intuition

--- Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

> On 2008-01-16 19:19, Rick McCallister wrote:
>
> > Polish would seem to be the most conservative
> Slavic
> > language in the sense that it preserves nasals,
>
> You mean nasal vowels, I suppose. There's hardly any
> language that isn't
> conservative in SOME respects. For example, Slovene
> and both Sorbian
> languages still preserve the dual in nouns,
> adjectives, pronouns and
> verbs (Polish lost it a few centuries ago). Several
> Slavic languages
> (including Russian) have lexically/gramatically
> determined
> (phonologically free) stress or accent (Polish has
> developed an almost
> rigid rule of penult stress), Czech looks to me,
> impressionistically,
> more conservative than Polish in matters of
> vocabulary (but this may be
> an effect of the purist movement during the Czech
> National Revival in
> the early decades of the 19th c.). Nasal vowels were
> lost in East Slavic
> and the Czech/Slovak group pretty early, but other
> Slavic languages lost
> them one by one in more recent times.
>
> > has a
> > complex grammar (unlike much of S. Slavic) but I
> think
> > Piotr could answer that better.
>
> If you have Bulgarian in mind, and if by a complex
> grammar you
> understand complicated inflectional morphology,
> that's true. The
> Serbo-Croatian inflectional system is every inch as
> complex as, and more
> coservative than, that of Polish.
>
> Piotr
>
>

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