Re: Brugmann's Law

I've wondered how Fred Flintstone was received in
Slavic countries with his yabba-dabba-doo which sounds
like /jeba-deba-duu/. My Serbian friend told me that
in the Serbian version they pronounce it /jaaba/.
--which is a shame.
I've heard Ukrainian grad students pronounce Russian &
Serbian govno as /ghivno/ --sometimes with /g/,
sometimes with /h/ but the /i/ they used sounded more
like English /I/ of <it> than the very high tense /+/
of Russian. I asked them about the pronunciation of
<g> and they told me it depends on where you're from
and how Ukainian you want to be. But, OTOH, all of
them ate /pirohi/ --which we Americans doubly
pluralize as "piroguies" /p@.../. I like them in
sour cream with capers, onions and mushrooms --topped
with dill.
Keep a plate ready for me ;p


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

> On 2008-01-17 22:11, ualarauans wrote:
>
> > Is it o > u > ü > i?
>
> Something of the sort, except the /u/ stage. It's
> very much like the
> fronting of ME /o:/ in Scots (the <guid> vowel,
> which also has become
> /i/ in some, but by no means all, Scots accents).
> Ukrainian dialects
> often have a special vowel (distinct from /i/) in
> this lexical set; it
> can be described as high, unrounded, not-quite-front
> and very tense; the
> usual spelling used by dialectologists is <y^>, and
> the realisation is
> more or less = X-SAMPA [1].
>
> >> This particular pun (I've never seen it, but get
> it) would work
> >> throughout Slavic. Most of out swear-words have
> very ancient
> > pedigrees.
> >
> > Could you please recommend some reliable and
> easy-to-get source for
> > the origin and etymology of these words?
>
> I wonder if there is one. Etymological dictionaries
> may be helpful, but
> I don't think it has occured to anyone to write a
> monograph about
> obscene words in Slavic (which is a pity). And as
> for dictionaries... I
> have just discovered, to my severe disappointed,
> that Vasmer's Russian
> etymological dictionary, otherwise so complete, has
> none of the three
> worst ones (by which I mean two nouns and one verb).
> How Victorian! Just
> like the New English Dictionary omitting the two
> most tabooed English
> tetragrammata. Derksen has an entry for the verb
> *(j)ebati, presumably
> because its Sanskrit and Greek cognates make it too
> time-honoured to be
> ignored, but I can't see the nouns there. Aren't the
> Baltic and Albanian
> connections of *pizda 'cunt' respectable enough?
> Even good old Pokorny
> has an entry for it!
>
> Those words present interesting comparative problems
> and certainly
> deserve to be discussed; in particular the exact
> relation of Gk. oípHo:
> (and zépHuros) to *jebati and Skt. yábHati _has_
> been much discussed
> (however, without reaching firm conclusions). There
> is a brief
> discussion of these issues in Beekes's Greek
> dictionary in the relevant
> entries.
>
> Piotr
>
>
>

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