[2015] Dabragezas and friends: a celebratory note on 6th-century Slavic (original) (raw)
Related papers
On the relative chronology of the II regressive and the progressive palatalizations of Common Slavic
Russian Linguistics, 2020
This article examines one of the oldest conundra of Slavic historical linguistics, namely the relative chronology of the II regressive and the progressive palatalizations of velar obstruents. To do so, it is first of all shown that these palatalizations constitute two discrete innovations and not a single bidirectional change. On the basis of a thorough analysis of the competing hypotheses it is then argued that the assumption of a relative chronology which dates the progressive before the II regressive palatalization (Pedersen’s chronology), allows the attested forms to be accounted for best. The main complication relating to this chronology concerns certain inflectional endings of the Old Church Slavonic pronouns vьsь and sicь. In the instrumental singular masculine and neuter and the genitive, dative, instrumental and locative plural these pronouns show endings of the hard inflectional type instead of the expected soft-stem endings. Contrary to what may be considered the communis opinio, this peculiarity can, however, be explained by means of a morphological innovation. This assumption is supported by evidence from the medieval Novgorod and Pskov dialects. Three morphological mechanisms, which may have been involved in the rise of the unexpected endings, are discussed: proportional analogy, product-oriented innovation and syntagmatic assimilation. Examples of typologically parallel developments from Slavic and other languages are provided in order to substantiate the claim of a morphological innovation.
2013. On the Origin of the Slavic Aspects: Aorist and Imperfect
This chapter presents a sketch of the prehistorical development of the Common Slavic preterital imperfect/aorist category. The methods of internal analysis and linguistic geography are applied to mostly well established data in order to reconstruct major elements of this development, in particular the relative chronology of the main morphological changes, correlations with well-known Common Slavic phonological changes, as well as correlations of regional morphological differences with major phonological isoglosses. The results contribute to our understanding of the development of Common Slavic and its dialectal differentiation in the period of the "Slavic migrations". 1
Slavs in the Making. History, Linguistics and Archaeology in Eastern Europe (ca. 500–ca. 700)
2021
Slavs in the Making takes a fresh look at archaeological evidence from parts of Slavic-speaking Europe north of the Lower Danube, including the present-day territories of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Nothing is known about what the inhabitants of those remote lands called themselves during the sixth century, or whether they spoke a Slavic language. The book engages critically with the archaeological evidence from these regions, and questions its association with the "Slavs" that has often been taken for granted. It also deals with the linguistic evidence—primarily names of rivers and other bodies of water—that has been used to identify the primordial homeland of the Slavs, and from which their migration towards the Lower Danube is believed to have started. It is precisely in this area that sociolinguistics can offer a serious alternative to the language tree model currently favoured in linguistic paleontology. The question of how best to explain the spread of Slavic remains a controversial issue. This book attempts to provide an answer, and not just a critique of the method of linguistic paleontology upon which the theory of the Slavic migration and homeland relies. The book proposes a model of interpretation that builds upon the idea that (Common) Slavic cannot possibly be the result of Slavic migration. It addresses the question of migration in the archaeology of early medieval Eastern Europe, and makes a strong case for a more nuanced interpretation of the archaeological evidence of mobility. It will appeal to scholars and students interested in medieval history, migration, and the history of Eastern and Central Europe.
Diachrony and typology of Slavic aspect: What does morphology tell us
In this article we consider the Slavic perfective/imperfective opposition, a well-known example of viewpoint aspect which establishes a classificatory grammatical category by means of stem derivation. Although Slavic languages are not unique in having developed a classificatory aspect system, a survey of such systems shows that the Slavic perfective/imperfective opposition is a particularly rare subcase of such systems, first of all because it combines prefixing with suffixing patterns of derivation. We therefore explore the morphology involved, tracing its development from Proto-Indo-European into Early Slavic. The emergence of Slavic aspect is atypical for grammatical categories, and it deviates considerably from mainstream instances of grammaticalization in many respects. We show that there is a strong tendency (i) towards abandonment of highly lexically conditioned and versatile suffix choices in Proto-Indo-European and in Common Slavic, which led to fewer and more transparent suffixes, and (ii) towards concatenation, away from originally non-concatenative (fusional) schemata. Furthermore, we compare Slavic with some other Indo-European languages and inquire as to why in Europe no other Indo-European group beyond Slavic went so far as to productively exploit newly developed prefixes (or verb particles) merely for use as aspectual modifiers of stems and to combine them with a (partially inherited, partially remodelled) stock of suffixes to yield a classificatory aspect system. The Slavic system, thus, appears quite unique not only from a typological point of view, but also in diachronic-genealogical terms. Based on this background, amplified by some inner-Slavic biases in the productivity of patterns of stem derivation, we pose the provocative question as to whether the rise and consolidation of the stem-derivational perfective/imperfective opposition in Slavic was favoured by direct and indirect contacts with Uralic (Finno-Ugric) and Altaic (Turkic) populations at different periods since at least the time of the Great Migrations.
The present paper deals with the possibility of interpreting the palatalizations of velars and/or the emergence of the correlation of palatalization in "Slavic" by the influence of "Altaic" languages. The negative position, recently expressed by Stachowski (2020), is discussed in the broader context of the history of this hypothesis and, above all, in terms of modern theories of language contact. It is shown that some of Stachowskiʼs objections (in particular the lack of lexical borrowings and the large difference in the features under consideration between Slavic and the putative source language) do not correspond to the principles and findings of contact linguistics. Despite illustrating the explanatory power of the most likely scenario of "Altaic" influence, as introduced by Galton, we ultimately agree that the lack of linguistic data on the languages of the Huns and Avars is a major obstacle that makes this theory unprovable.
Slavistična revija, 2024
In a previous study we showed that in some peripheral dialects of Common Slavic, the aorist/infinitive suffix of Class II verbs was *-nu-. In the present study, we focus on the diachronic explanation of the variation *-nǫ- ~ *-ny- ~ *-nu-in this suffix. We propose that its rise was facilitated by CSl phonological developments in final syllables, at the juncture of stem markers and the PIE endings: 2sg *-neh₂-s (or possibly 2sg *-neh₂-s(-s) and 3sg *-neh₂-s-t) > CSl *-ny; (possibly) 1sg *-new-m > CSl *-nǫ; 3sg and word-internally *-new-(t) > CSl *-nu(-). The resulting allomorphy could be leveled in different directions, whereby the causes traditionally invoked to explain *-nǫ-and *-ny- (perseverative nasalization, analogy to other verbal stems) played a role too.