On 2008-11-15 10:24, tgpedersen wrote:
> Is it possible to split up early Slavic into 'high' and 'low'
> sociolects and assign *o- to 'high', *je- to 'low' (that would explain
> the non-occurrence of *ob- "phuck"), and does *o-/*vo- behave similarly?
At least in the Old Russian area there is evidence of the reverse: as
forms with <je-> were preferred in Church Slavonic, they came to be
regarded as "high" or "literary" as opposed to <o->. Other than that, we
just see a good deal of variation, some of it regional and some,
possibly, sociolinguistic, but the details are hard to reconstruct.
Different Slavic dialects (even within one and the same language)
developed different preferences, but the survival of <je- ~ o-> doublets
in many places shows that the variation dates back to Proto-Slavic.
There are a few <je-> words which never show <o> anywhere (e.g. the
forms of 'to be', such as *jestI), and the merger is asymmetrical: there
are few clear examples of etymological *o-/*a- becoming Slavic (and/or
Baltic) *e- (perhaps relicts of a still older partial merger). The
complete story of *e- ~ *a- variation in Balto-Slavic would is a long
and winding tale, with many poorly known episodes.
Piotr