Re: Amanda's sentences as translation exercise

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?
>
> I ask 'cos I notice that conjugation I verbs have е as a kind of
> "thematic vowel" (-у, -ешь, -ет, -ем, -ете, -ут), which when stressed
> becomes ё (-у, -ёшь, -ёт, -ём, -ёте, -ут). This seems remarkably similar
> to the Greek e/o thematic vowel alternation in the primary verb endings
> (-ω, -εις, -ει, -ομεν, -ετε, -ουσι(ν), -ομαι, -ῃ (-ει),
> -εται, -ομεθα,
> -εσθε, -ονται, etc.). In fact, when ё follows a "hard" (non-palatized)
> consonant, it is realized simply as [o]. From what I understand, ё is
> sometimes written simply as е but pronounced as [jo], so ё apparently
> developed out of е. My question is whether this happened before or after
> proto-Slavic(?) split from PIE?
This is an interesting topic, which I think came up on this list a while ago.

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.

This is also the cause for e/ë minimal pairs -- the ë comes from *e
while the e comes from *yat.

...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).

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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