Re: w-glide

W dniu 2011-06-14 19:01, Sergejus Tarasovas pisze:

> Here's what might have happened.
>
> In Slavic, we find *i"nU (a) 'some, another', which looks like the
> original '1' (<*(H)(e)iHno-) downgraded to an indefinite pronoun/article
> by grammaticalization. To remedy this, Proto-Slavic univerbated *ed i"nU
> '*only one'>'1', with a limitative *ed (<(h1)edH- '?') found also in
> *edva" 'just only' > 'hardly, barely'. Now the va" 'just (?)' of this
> *ed va" looks suspiciously cognate to Lith. vo~s 'just, barely'; they
> both can continue some *(H)weh2- '?'. It may well be that -- differently
> from Old Prussian -- East Baltic sided with Proto-Slavic in feeling the
> need to strengthen its '1' by adding something like 'just' (a mere
> speculation, of course -- deriving Lith. ýnas 'true, real' from '1'
> doesn't look promising at all). Now, this *wa? ai?nás 'just one' (end
> stressed, as evidenced by the mobile paradigm of Lith. víenas and by the
> broken tone of Latv. viêns) was contracted into *wai?nás whose -ai- was
> -- despite being unstressed (!) -- monophthongized and then again
> dissolved into -ie-.

I like this idea. How about something related to the adversative
conjunction/particle *h2(a)u 'on the other hand, moreover, once more',
as in Gk. aû, Lat. aut(em), Gmc. *auk- etc.? In Greek, at any rate, it's
very often used with numerals. Slavic *ovU belongs here. Talking of
stress, wouldn't Nieminen's Law (retraction of stress from short *a in
the final syllable to a preceding long nucleus) be older than the
monophthongisation? Cf. die~vas < *deiwó-.

Piotr

Piotr