Re: Origins of [i\]

On Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:12:13 -0500, Steven A. Williams
<ignisglaciesque@...> wrote:

>In Russian, it appears to have arisen as [i] after non-palatalized
>consonants (especially the retroflexes). Then again, I seem to recall that
>palatalization arose as a secondary feature of vowels at some point in the
>history of the Slavic languages, so I probably am mistaken.
Yup, Russian [i\] is mostly from older [u:].  The modern complementary
distribution is a consequence of the fact that only palatalised consonants
occurred before [i(:)] and only non-palatalised ones before [u(:)].  But I
think it is true that in a separate later change [i] went to [i\] after
retroflexes.  (There's also a restriction against velars before [i\] -- or
is that just in the spelling?  In any case I don't know where it comes from.)

Few other examples off the top of my head:
- in Ossetian, [i\] is the merger of original short/weak [i] and [u] (the
long ones remained non-central);
- in Middle Welsh, [i\] came from [I], also continuing contrastively short [i];
- in Romanian I think stressed [i\] is from [a] or [e] before nasals.

Alex