The prehistory of the Balto-Slavic accent by Jay H. Jasanoff (original) (raw)

[Review of] Jasanoff Jay H. Prehistory of Balto-Slavic Accent

Вопросы языкового родства / Journal of Language Relationship, 2017

Jay H. Jasanoff. Prehistory of Balto-Slavic Accent. Brill’s Studies in Indo-European Languages & Linguistics. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017. X + 268 pp. [download the file to see all diacritics]

From Proto-Indo-European to Slavic

Journal of Indo European Studies, 1994

A correct evaluation of the Slavic evidence for the reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language requires an extensive knowledge of a considerable body of data. While the segmental features of the Slavic material are generally of corroborative value only, the prosodic evidence is crucial for the reconstruction of PIE. phonology. Due to the complicated nature of Slavic historical accentology, this has come to be realized quite recently. 1 As a result, much of the earlier literature has become obsolete to the extent that it is based upon an interpretation which does not take the multifarious accentual developments into account. I shall give one example. In Evidence for laryngeals (ed. by W. Winter, 1965), which remains a milestone in Indo-European studies, two of the authors adduce the short accent of SCr. sȑce 'heart' as evidence for a Proto-Slavic acute tone (117, 133). Actually, Slavic *sьrdьce has a falling tone and mobile accentuation, as is clear from the Slovene and Russian evidence. The circumflex was regularly shortened in trisyllabic word forms (see 9.4 below), e.g. mlȁdōst 'youth', cf. mlȃd 'young', and prȃse 'suckingpig', gen.sg. prȁseta. This does not detract from the fact that we have to reconstruct an acute tone for Balto-Slavic in view of Latvian sirds 'heart'. In Slavic, the acute tone became circumflex in words with mobile stress in accordance with Meillet's law (see 5.4 below). The tone of trisyllabic neuters can never be used for comparative purposes because they always have mobile accentuation if they belong to the older layers of the language. The Balto-Slavic acute tone in the word for 'heart' is no evidence for either a laryngeal or a PIE. long vowel because it arose phonetically before PIE. *d in accordance with Winter's law (see 4.3 below). The only evidence for an original long vowel is found in Old Prussian seyr, which in combination with the East Baltic and Slavic material points to a PIE. alternating paradigm *ḱēr(d), *ḱṛd-. The full grade form of the root *ḱerd-is attested in Lith. šerdìs 'core', OCS. srěda 'middle'. The small chapter on Balto-Slavic in Evidence for laryngeals is not only very short, but also quite useless. In the following I intend to present a synopsis of the main developments from Proto-Indo-European to Slavic in their chronological order so far as that has been established at this moment. It is largely based on my earlier account of the accen-1 For a survey of recent research I refer to the Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung 92 (1978), 269-281.

Issues in Balto-Slavic accentology

Accent Matters: Papers on Balto-Slavic …, 2011

After the very well-organized Leiden conference for which we must be grateful to Tijmen Pronk, it seems appropriate for me to review some of the papers, as I did after the previous conferences in Zagreb and Copenhagen. The aim of this review is merely to point out some of the differences of opinion which require further debate. Mislav Benić presents a detailed description of verbal accentuation in the dialect of Kukljica on the island of Ugljan. The dialect has no tonal distinctions but does have vowel quantity in stressed and pretonic syllables, with large-scale lengthening of short vowels under the stress. It has preserved the Common Slavic distinction between original pretonic long vowels, which were shortened as a result of the rise of the new timbre differences, and new pretonic long vowels which arose as a result of Dybo's law (cf. Kortlandt 2005: 126-128), e.g. jazȋk 'tongue' (with secondary lengthening of the stressed vowel) versus nạ̄ rȍd 'people'. It has also preserved the distinction between simplex verbs with mobile stress, e.g. budȋn 'wake up', gasȋn 'turn off', and compound verbs where the prefix lost the stress to the root in accordance with Dybo's law, e.g. prebȗdin, ugȁsin (ibidem, 127). Moreover, it has preserved the accentual mobility of the original nasal present in nȅ znon 'don't know' (cf. Kortlandt 1985) and the retracted stress of the original imperative in vȗci, cȋdi of vūčȇn 'pull', cidȋn 'filter' (cf. Kortlandt 1979: 53). Miguel Carrasquer Vidal proposes a derivation of acute and circumflex tones from the syllable structure of the proto-language. His account involves tones on unstressed syllables, resyllabifications, analogical replacements, ad hoc rules for different stem formations and for different languages, secondary developments, unexplained exceptions for which he posits a PIE distinction between *i and *j, and structural ambiguity of the postvocalic ending *-ns. He lists a number of Slavic Auslautgesetze in order to arrive at the correct output. Since I have discussed all of the issues elsewhere, I shall not return to the many points of disaggreement here. Vladimir Dybo compares the West Caucasian, Balto-Slavic and Japanese accent systems in terms of "dominant" and "recessive" morphemes expressed in syllables and contours. In my review of last year's conference in Copenhagen, I have shown how the class of dominant suffixes originated from several retrac

Balto-Slavic phonological developments

Baltistica, 2011

Elsewhere I have proposed the following relative chronology of early sound changes (1989a: 42-47, 2005a: 115-118): (1) Neutralization of the opposition between palatovelars and labiovelars after *u and *s, yielding a palatovelar before *i and a plain velar elsewhere (cf. Steensland 1973: 34, Kortlandt 1979: 58). This development belongs to the Proto-Indo-European period (stages 1.2 and 1.3 of my chronology). (2) Rephonemicization of the opposition between fortes ("voiceless") and lenes ("voiced aspirates") as an opposition between voiceless and (plain) voiced stops. This was a shared innovation of all Indo-European languages except Anatolian and Tocharian and therefore belongs to the dialectal Indo-European period (my stage 2.1). The (lenes) glottalic stops (traditionally called "plain voiced") became preglottalized voiced at this stage (cf. Kortlandt 1978a: 110). (3) Retraction of *s to *ṣ after *i, *u, *r, *k in Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian. The highly specific character of this sound change points to a common, dialectal Indo-European development (my stage 2.2).

Balto-Slavic accentuation revisited

Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch, 2010

Balto-Slavic accentuation revisited There is every reason to welcome the revised edition (2009) of Thomas Olander's dissertation (2006), which I have criticized elsewhere (2006). The book is very well written and the author has a broad command of the scholarly literature. I have not found any mistakes in Olander's rendering of other people's views. This makes the book especially useful as an introduction to the subject. It must be hoped that the easy access to a complex set of problems which this book offers will have a stimulating effect on the study of Balto-Slavic accentology. The purpose of the following observations is twofold. On the one hand, I intend to show that what the author evidently regards as his main result, the "mobility law", cannot be accepted because it is incompatible with the data. On the other hand, my aim is to pinpoint the essential differences between Olander's theory and mine (e.g. 1989a, 2005b, 2008a) in order to clarify where progress can be made. In the following, bracketed numbers which do not denote the Lithuanian accent classes (1) through (4) will refer to the pages of the book under discussion (Olander 2009). The origin of the mistaken analysis which has resulted in Olander's "mobility law" must be sought in his reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Slavic. Following the German (Brugmannian, pre-structuralist) tradition, Olander reconstructs five short and five long vowel phonemes *i, *e, *a, *o, *u, *ī, *ē, *ā, *ō, *ū, of which *i and *u had non-syllabic variants which were "probably in complementary distribution" but are nevertheless distinguished in the reconstructions, four resonants *r, *l, *m, *n with "syllabic realisation between consonants" distinguished by a ring underneath, "four fricatives" *s, *h 1 , *h 2 , *h 3 , the latter of which had "vocalic variants" *ə 1 , *ə 2 , *ə 3 , three labial stops *p, *b, *b h , three dental stops *t, *d, *d h , three palatal stops *k • , *g• , *g• h , three velar stops *k, *g, *g h , and three labiovelar stops *k w , *g w , *g wh (83), i.e. a total of 10 vowels, two of which had consonantal realizations, and 23 consonants, seven of which had "vocalic variants". This large and complex phonological system, which allows an impressive number of 425 CV and 10625 CVC sequences, is clearly at variance with Olander's professed "methodological choice to attach considerable weight to simplicity" of reconstructed syn