From: Alwin K.
Message: 62628
Date: 2009-01-28
"So please go on with your argumentation till the end, if possible,
following also, all the positions in discussion."
Well, I must admit that I'm not an expert in Balto-Slavic accentology, and I think that Kortlandt himself has already responded satisfactorily to Jasanoff's article and Jens' rule in http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art227e.pdf.Nevertheless, I do want to react to Jasanoff's view on the the example of Lith. duõs and, together with it, SCr. dâ. He firstly states that the starting point for this form was the PIE root aorist *déh3-t, and that "it would be hard to believe that the post-IE sigmatization of 3 sg. aor. *déh3-t [dóh3t] could have been attended by an actual change from e-grade to e:-grade". This is nonsense of course. These forms do not reflect secondarily sigmaticized root aorists, but rather root aorists that have been transferred to the type of s-aorists. We all know that s-aorists had in their 3sg. form the structure *Cé:C-s-t (whatever be its origin), and since these forms have been fit in into this type, they must reflect *dé:h3-s-t as well.A major argument for Jasanoff against reconstructing a form with a long *e: is that "a 3sg. *dé:h3st would, by Eichner's Law, have been realized as [dé:h3-s-t], not [dó:h3-s-t]". Apparently, to Jasanoff Eichner's Law is unquestionable, but since for us this whole story started with the question whether or not Eichner's Law is correct, this cannot be used as an argument in our discussion.So, looking objectively at the data, we must conclude that we are dealing with a pre-form *dé:h3-s-t and the outcomes Lith. duõs and SCr. dâ.So what happened? First, the long *e: apparantly did get coloured to *o:. Secondly, the form yielded a circumflex intonation. How come? Well, one could set up different scenarios for this. Jens apparently thinks that the monosyllabicity of the form plays a role. But exactly what did happen then? According to Jasanoff, the acute intonation "was a kind of stød or broken tone”, i.e. a glottalic pronunciation of the vowel. This would mean that "circumflexation" is the elimination of that glottalic pronunciation. In other words: Jens' theory can be interpreted as 'loss of glottalic pronunciation in monosyllables'. Since in this case that glottalic pronunciation should have been cuased by the laryngeal, we can refrase his idea as 'loss of a laryngeal in monosyllables'. Kortlandt states that the circumflex is due to loss of the laryngeal after a lengthened grade. Since Kortlandt assumes that the PIE lengthened grades originated in the lengthening of vowels in monosyllabic words (a view going back to Wackernagel), we could rewrite his theory as 'loss of a laryngeal after lengthened grades, which originated in monosyllables'.As we see, Jens' solution and Kortlandt's solution are actually the same. It isn't so 'ad hoc' to assume loss of a laryngeal (i.e. a glottal stop) in certain conditions: in a sense Jens does that too. The only difference is one's view on chronology: Jens sees the rule as more or less synchronic (as I am not mistaken, I haven't read Jens' article for a long time), whereas Kortlandt has a more precies view on where in the chronology certain things occured, and exactly what caused what to happen.Best, Alwin