Re: Amanda's sentences as translation exercise

On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 09:38:38PM +0200, Philip Newton wrote:
> On 10/24/06, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> wrote:
> >On that note, I'm curious about the historical development of the е/ё
> >distinction in Russian. Is it a purely Slavic development, or did it
> >already happen before/during the split from PIE?
[...]
> 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.)

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?


> This is also the cause for e/ë minimal pairs -- the ë comes from *e
> while the e comes from *yat.
In stressed positions, that is. Unstressed е, AFAIK, could have come
either from the historical е or yat, but the modern orthography does not
distinguish between them.


> ...ah, no. Googling through my past email (yay Gmail!), it was a
> LiveJournal entry I had posted,
> http://community.livejournal.com/linguaphiles/2634954.html , and the
> ensuing comments (in particular the one by ekeme_ndiba).
[...]

So if I got the picture right, it's something like this: (?)

Pre-1918: е consistently turns into ё when stressed (but remains е if
unstressed). Yat was a separate letter, but had become allophonous with
(unstressed) е by 1918.

Post-1918: Yat was eliminated from the orthography, and words with yat
were respelled with е. So е in modern orthography could be either the
historical е or yat. The former turns into ё when stressed (e.g., in
conjugation I verb endings), but the latter doesn't, so now there are
minimal pairs with the е/ё distinction.

Of course, a little Googling reveals that the е/ё affair (even excluding
yat from the picture) isn't exactly this simple. Ё was apparently
introduced as late as the 18th century in the midst of confusion between
е and ο in spelling. Does anyone know what was the phonological status
of stressed/unstressed е before the introduction of ё?


T

--
Don't drink and derive. Alcohol and algebra don't mix.

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