Russian e and jat' (was: Amanda's sentences as translation exercise)

H. S. Teoh skrev:
> On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 09:38:38PM +0200, Philip
> Newton wrote:
>> On 10/24/06, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> wrote:
> [...]
>> e and o/yo appear to alternate in several places.
>>
>> Note that what makes things more complicated is that
>> modern /e/ used to be separate phonemes (as I understand
>> it) -- yat and e -- which merged later on. IIRC, *e
>>     turned to o in some cases but *yat never
>> did.
>
> So is it correct that е consistently turns into ё when
> stressed, but yat never did, so after the 1918 reform, the
> words that used to have stressed yat are now written with
> stressed е, but the original е/ё distinction was purely
> a result of stress? (Since ё is always stressed, and verb
> endings have the stressed е -> ё rule, this seems to
> indicate that pre-1918 stressed е consistently turned
> into ё.)
It is correct that in inherited vocabulary original stressed
_*e_ turned into _(j)o_ (ë) while original _*&_ (jat' --
I'm using the CXS for its probable Common Slavic
pronunciation) became _(j)e_ in all positions, but in
addition there is a layer of Church Slavic loan words which
have _(j)e_ for stressed _*e_ -- i.e. every Russian stressed
_(j)o_ comes from _*e_, but not every stressed _(j)e_ comes
from _*&_. There are even minimal pairs with one inherited
Russian form and one ChS loan, with slightly different
meanings. It is a bit like French having both _raison_ as
inherited from Proto-Romance and _ration_ as a loan from
Latin (both of course in turn borrowed into English, with
_raison_ getting the Anglicized spelling _reason_).

> The question remains, though, where the *phonological*
> distinction between е and ё come from. If we discount
> yat from consideration, it seems that [je] vs. [jo]
> existed much farther back in antiquity. My question is
> whether this distinction already existed at the time proto-
> Slavic split from PIE, or did it come into existence
> afterwards?
Later, although it's IIANM shared with the other East Slavic
languages and Lekhitic (the North West group of Slavic to
which Polish belongs, so it's not that new. South and South
West Slavic lack it altogether, and thus also Church Slavic.

PIE short _*a_ (aka _*H2e_) and _*o_ (aka partly _*o_ and
partly _*H3e_) merged as _*o_ in Common Slavic, while _*a:
(aka _*eH2_) and _*o:_ (aka partly _*o:_, partly _*eH3_)
merged as Common Slavic _*a_ -- probably [Q] and [Q:] in Balto-
Slavic and Proto-Slavic. PIE _*e_ remained CSl. _*e_ while
PIE _*e:, *ai, *oi_ (with the usual hedges WRT the intra-PIE
origins of _*a_ and _*o_ :-) merged as CSl. _*&_ (again
probably earlier [&] and [&:]). For some not fully clarified
reasons -- it may be a morphological merger/analogy -- some
PIE _*o/*o:_ merged with _*u/*u:_ in final syllables, and
thus CSl. _y_ and _U_, the latter of which usually becomes
zero in Russian.

A good introduction to these matters is "Introduction to the
phonological history of the Slavic languages" by Terence R.
Carlton Columbus, Ohio : Slavica Publishers, 1991 ISBN
0893572233. He is far more accessible than his sources, like
Shevelov, and far more concise (in the good sense) than the
German stuff on the subject I first got my paws on.

As for the spelling of /jo/ it appears IO -- i.e. the old
Roman-looking i + o was in some use before ë was invented.
Of course it was liable to confusion with _ju_.

IMNSHO the smart thing would have been to use jat' for all
instances of /je/ and E for all instances of /jo/, and then
of course to consistently mark stress with accents -- if the
Greeks, Czechs, Irish and Icelanders can be consistent with
their accents, why not the Cyrillic-users? --, except in
jat' where it'd be superfluous. That way the current
sloppiness WRT e <> ë would not have arisen

BTW Germanic also had *a/*o merger with subsequent phonetic
split between the long and short, but with the opposite
values, the longs becoming _*o:_ and the shorts _a_. Alas
there happened so many funky things (fronting,
monophthongization and umlaut splits)to Germanic _*a_ and
_*ai_ in Old English that the Anglo-Russian correspondences
are hard to unravel -- i.e. possible but I don't have the
time: I have a Russkij mid-term exam tomorrow! As usual I
got the grammar pat down but the vocabulary hanging in limbo
-- quite the opposite of everybody else.

BTW does anyone know any good overview of Russian
motion verbs?

And yes, I refuse to transcribe Slavic /j/ with _y_, not
so much because _staryy_
looks dead ugly -- or rather like a long [i\:] --, and
_stary_ just plain wrong, but because e.g. /i\je/ actually
occurs, and _ye_ thus is ambiguous.

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot

                                 (Max Weinreich)


--


/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot

                                 (Max Weinreich)

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