REVIEW ARTICLE: Christina Y. Bethin: Slavic Prosody: Language Change and Phonological Theory (original) (raw)

Professor Bethin' s ambitious and challenging book has a chapter titled 'The syllable in Slavic: form and function' (12-111), one titled 'Beyond the syllable: prominence relations' (112-87), and a miscellany titled 'Theoretical considerations' (188-265). They are preceded by a preface and introduction (xii-11) and followed by end notes (266-301) and an imposing list of references (302-46). The Slavic of her title includes Proto-Slavic (up to the middle of our first millennium), Common Slavic (6th-8th centuries), and Late Common Slavic (9th-12th centuries). Chapter 1 is concerned with the development of diphthongal syllable rhymes. Displaying an encyclopedic knowledge of the Slavistic literature, Bethin reviews the history of how oral, nasal, and liquid diphthongs were monophthongized, recasting it in the framework of autosegmental phonology. These syllable rhymes, she argues, were shaped by the interplay of various constraints on syllable structure. 'Proto-Slavic had a front/back, a high/nonhigh, and a long/short opposition in vowels', quite traditionally begins the section titled 'Monophthongization' (39). These features defined a square system with four vowels: [+high,-back] i, [+high, +back] u, [-high,-back] e, and [-high, +back] o. Bethin and many other Slavists use the more familiar symbols e, o, and a for the nonhigh vowels, but I find e and a useful as a reminder that Proto-Slavic fused PIE *o and *a into a single nonhigh back vowel and so converted the inherited triangular system with three degrees of opening to a square system with two. The vowels being also long, they included [+high,-back] ii, [+high,-i-back] uu, [-high,-back] ee, and [-high, +back] do. Bethin uses a feature representation for long vowels (7, u, etc.), but for discussing monophthongization I find a geminate representation more convenient. 1 Still in traditional terms, Bethin continues: 'There were oral diphthongs (ei, eu, oi, ou), nasal diphthongs (in, im, en, em, un, um, on, om), and eight liquid diphthongs (//, ir, ul, ur, el, er, ol, ar)\ (I have substituted my vowel symbols for hers.) But as we read on we become aware of the author's ambivalence on the subject of diphthongs. A diphthong is commonly understood to be two sonorants in the same syllable nucleus; for example, monosyllabic E proud consists of an brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk