Balto-Slavic accentology

The position of the so-called ‘Baltic’ languages Lithuanian, Latvian and Old Prussian within the Balto-Slavonic branch of Indo-European is still a matter of debate. Within Balto-Slavonic, the Slavonic sub-branch is clearly identifiable due to an exclusive set of phonological and morphological innovations not shared by ‘Baltic’. The ‘East Baltic’ languages Lithuanian and Latvian are similarly separated from both Slavonic and the ‘West Baltic’ language Old Prussian by a set of characteristic innovations. What remains to be clarified, is the exact position of Old Prussian. Traditionally, Old Prussian is either grouped with ‘East Baltic’, thus implying a common Proto-Baltic stage after
the disintegration of Proto-Balto-Slavonic, or it is seen as a separate sub-branch of Balto-Slavonic. The situation is additionally complicated by several nontrivial features shared by ‘East Baltic’ and Slavonic but not found in Old Prussian. Such features point to a third possible position on the sub-branches of Balto-Slavonic, i.e. grouping East Baltic together with Slavonic which implies a particularly early separation of Old Prussian from the rest of the branch. The paper intends to foster the theoretical discussion by pointing out two nontrivial phonological developments which must be assumed for both ‘East’ and ‘West Baltic’ but not for Slavonic and therefore may constitute evidence for Proto-Baltic as a parent language of both ‘Baltic’ branches.

The paper argues that the distribution of the two late PSl. reflexes of early PSl. *oi# (namely, *ě2# and *i2#) is governed in a regular fashion by the presence or absence of an original [+acute] feature on the original diphthong. The old "Jagić rule" (which is generally NOT believed to be borne out by the data) should be thought of as an exceptionless (Neogrammarian-style) sound law.

This PhD thesis examines a phenomenon known as Monosyllabic Circumflexion (MC, hereafter) from a historical linguistics / phonological point of view. MC denotes a Lithuanian or Balto-Slavic phenomenon according to which long vowels and diphthongs in monosyllabic words exhibit a circumflex tone instead of the expected acute tone. It is observed in the following four categories:

All South Slavic languages, from Bulgaria in the SouthEast to Slovenia in the NorthWest , are part of a dialect continuum. This paper outlines the position of what is traditionally called Kajkavian in that continuum in light of old accentual isoglosses. Kajkavian shares several old prosodic-phonological iso-glosses with Slovene (such as the rise of the neocircumflex), while on the other hand it is connected with Western Štokavian and Čakavian through some morphological categorial accentual isoglosses (like the innovative accent of the infinitive and l-participle).

The article discusses a number of cases in which Proto-Indo-European word-initial sequences of the type *Hi- and *Hu- yield an acute vowel in Baltic and in Slavic. It is argued that this is a regular development and that the acute accent was frequently transferred analogically to the corresponding full grade forms *Hei- and *Heu-.

The paper deals with several problems of Slavic historical accentology – pretonic length in the accentual paradigm c (and b) in South and West Slavic, the neo-circumflex phenomenon (including the accent in the genitive plural), the kȍkōt ‘rooster’ type lengthening in Čakavian, the ograda ‘fence’ type accent in Slavic, the reflex of Proto-Slavic *ò in Czech monosyllables (kůň ‘horse’ type words), as well as certain accent shifts (like the one in accentual paradigm b). The author criticizes the often untenable positions of Frederik Kortlandt on these issues, together with certain problematic aspects of his accentological modus operandi.

The article discusses the development of the Proto-Slavic vowels *o
and *e with a neoacute accent. These vowels are reflected as short
vowels, diphthongs or long vowels in the modern Slavic languages.
Their outcome is conditioned by the origin of the neoacute: if it arose
through retraction of the accent from a word-final jer, the newly accented *o or *e became long and was subsequently diphthongized in
a number of Slavic dialects. If the neoacute accent arose in a different
way, the quantity of the newly accented *o or *e depends on the dialect.

The aim of the current paper is to analyse deverbatives in Common Slavic regarding their accentual types and to find correlations of these types to the original deriving verbs. The verbs considered in this paper consist of data from Common Slavic, Balto-Slavic, and Indo-European reconstructions. The theoretical framework, used in this work is the one developed by the Moscow Accentological School.

In the following presentation, I will try to outline a theory of how the three Common Slavic accent paradigms (a, b and c) can be derived from accentual patterns in Proto-Indo-European, for both nouns/adjectives and verbs. A central assumption will be that Balto-Slavic had three accent paradigms, not two, as is usually assumed.

Vocatives in Vedic Sanskrit were lexically unaccented. In phrase-initial position, they host a phrasal tone, much as lexically unaccented words in Tokyo Japanese and Northern Bizkaian Basque. Departing from this grammar, we arrive just as easily at the Greek and Balto-Slavic data, so this is what we should reconstruct for the linguistic ancestor of those branches (at least). I find no evidence for a synchronic vocative accent retraction process.

The paper discusses the reflexes of the Proto-Slavic i-verbs accentual paradigms in Croatian (Štokavian/Čakavian/Kajkavian) dialects, with special regards to the reflexes of the a. p. b1 and b2, as well as to a Štokavian/Čakavian a. p. c > B: transfer. The paper provides a great amount of accentological data for the reconstruction of Proto-Slavic, Balto-Slavic and Indo-European accent.

Curonian, an extinct East Baltic language once spoken on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea, influenced the accentual systems of western dialects of Latvian and Lithuanian, as well as Livonian. Substrate or adstrate features in the accentual systems of these languages indicate that Curonian had fixed initial stress – ultimately due to a Balto-Fennic substrate in Curonian itself – and a tonal opposition between a broken tone and a sustained tone.

This paper deals with *-VRHi̯- sequences in Proto-Slavic. Under certain conditions they probably yielded *-V̀R’- sequences, thus introducing a new type of intonation – the so-called short neo-acute tone. If so, the evidence for Pinault’s law requires re-examination.

The article analyzes the accentuation of western South Slavic l-participles of verbal stems ending in an occlusive that are formed by adding the formant *-l- directly to the stem, e.g. *nes-lъ, Croatian nȅsao, Slovene nesel. Data from Slovene, Čakavian, Kajkavian and Štokavian dialects are compared and discussed against the background of late Proto-Slavic and early dialectal accentual and phonological changes. The operation of accentological changes such as Dybo’s law, Stang’s law and the rise of the neocircumflex, as well as the reduction of weak jers caused alternations in tone, vowel-length and position of the ictus. These alterations could be analogically eliminated or extended at different times and in different areas during the linguistic history
of western South Slavic, thus causing the rise of some of the earliest isoglosses in the area in which western South Slavic is spoken.

The paper is a part of an ongoing discussion on various topics of historical Slavic accentology with Frederik Kortlandt. The topics discussed in the paper are: the reflex of the Proto-Slavic short neo-acute in Kajkavian; the reflex of pretonic and posttonic length in West and South Slavic; the reconstruction of the ending *-ъ in Slavic genitive plural, its accentuation, and the ending -ā in Štokavian and Slovene; the lengthening of the bȏg ‘god’ and kȍkōt ‘rooster’ type in Western South Slavic; the *obőrna ‘defense’ and *čьrnĩna ‘blackness’ type accent and retractions of contractional neo-circumflexes; the reflex of Slavic *ò in Slovak and Czech monosyllables; and the valence theory and Proto-Indo-European origin of Balto-Slavic accentuation.

The paper discusses the accentual accommodation by speakers of the urban dia lect of Zagreb (the capital of Croatia), which has a dynamic free accent, to the Standard Croatian (Neo-Štokavian) pitch accent (with rising and falling tones). The accommodation occurs in formal sett ings—the basis of this research is the corpus of 16 one-hour interviews with native Zagreb dialect speakers (8 male, 8 female) from a TV show on Croatian national television (HRT). The Za-greb dialect speakers cannot fully reproduce the prescribed standard ac cen-tua tion, so they only approximate it by inconsistently changing the place of stress. The level of accommodation varies among speakers. The prescribed Cro a tian standard accentuation is diff erent than in languages like English, because it cannot be acquired fully by many speakers due mainly to reasons of pho netic complexity. The basics of the Zagreb dialect accentuation and its complex relation to the standard language accentuation (due to many in no va tions in the dialect and a range of conservative and innovative varieties) are also analyzed. This paper is the fi rst to describe the phenomenon in detail, based on concrete data.

This is a term paper, written at the time when I was graduate student at the University of Chicago and took a seminar in the History of Phonological Theory taught by Prof. John Goldsmith. The paper does not pretend to offer new solutions to the problems treated therein, but rather represents a historiographic essay,  which may be useful for those who a immersed in a particular paradigm of the study of Russian accentology and need a wider perspective.

The first part of the article deals with the ablaut pattern(s) that may be reconstructed on the basis of Slavic comparatives. It is claimed that three separate morphological categories (including comparatives) support the interpretation of the vowel o in some suppletive roots as derived from the ∅-grade, possibly within the amphikinetic pattern; thus a new sound law is suggested for Proto-Slavic. In the second part, it is illustrated how the remodeling of the Proto-Slavic comparative formative supports the interpretation of Proto-Indo-European comparatives as quasi-primary derivatives of change-of-state verbs; a parallel phenomenon is also described for Kashubian. Finally, accentual matters are briefly referred to. The paper includes some remarks on the vestiges of the Caland system in Slavic, too.

го окончания в чеlllСКОМ и старословацком: чеш. -tСh, дР.-чеш. -tech, СТ.-слвц. -tech (Stan. П, с. 80), а также рефлекс долготы в кашу6ском: словинц. 'X.l~pje'X., Ьгасе'Х.. Loc. pl. (о-основы ср.р.) словен. lijtth. тftBtth и др. : каАк. (Бедня) l1:ete, т/:eBte и др.; ср. схрв. лосавск. (РЬ Н) веИ, (па) let11; (ра) brdi, (и) drvi, (па) neЬеВ!: и др.; схрв. ceB.-чак. (Нови) ra.lfh, z.rсаИh, veBl1h и veBlih, па тeBt{h и др.; а также рефлекс долготы в кашу6ском: словинц. йЕ,;сё'Х., тJi~BCe'X..

The article deals with the history of SCr. krd(o) and its Balto-Slavic cognates. A supposed descendent of the zero-grade root *ḱr̥dh-, SCr. krdo acquired its plain velar as a result of the Proto-Indo-European depalatalization before a syllabic resonant. The other root variant reflected in Balto-Slavic, *skerdh-, which underlies Lith. sker͂džius ‘shepherd’ and sker͂dis ‘id.’, was also regularly depalatalized, as PIE *ḱ expectedly yields *k if preceded by *s. The e-grade without the s-mobile provided no conditions for the said depalatalization to occur, which points to the analogical spread of the plain velar from the other two variants. / Članak obrađuje istoriju sh. reči krd(o) i njoj srodnih baltoslovenskih oblika, sa posebnim osvrtom na poreklo inicijalnog velara.

Cet ouvrage s’intéresse aux facteurs morphologiques et sémantiques qui sont susceptibles de rendre compte de l’accentuation des thèmes en * ā (< * eh2) des différentes langues indo-européennes étudiées : dérivation primaire ou secondaire, présence ou non d’un vocalisme *o apophonique en cas de dérivation primaire, maintien ou rupture du lien qui unissait les formes étudiées à leur famille étymologique, sens abstrait ou concret, appartenance à un microsystème lexical impliquant une accentuation spécifique, etc. C’est en grec ancien que la conjonction de ces différents facteurs semble le mieux capable d’expliquer l’essentiel des données accentuelles relatives aux noms en *-ā, et, de ce fait, c’est le dossier grec qui se trouve le plus largement développé dans cette étude (p. 7-367). Mais cet ouvrage traite aussi assez largement de faits védiques (p. 373-412), baltiques et slaves (p. 413-512), ainsi que germaniques (p. 513-532). Il aborde également une question transversale, à savoir celle du contraste accentuel qui apparaît entre des formes de masculin ou de neutre singulier thématiques et des formes de féminin ou de neutre pluriel d’origine collective (p. 533-565).

Comptes rendus :
- Francesco Dedè, Incontri Linguistici, 40, 2017, p. 183-184 ;
- Romain Garnier, Wékwos. Revue d’études indo-européennes, 3, 2017, p. 292-301 ;
- Julián Mendéz Dosuna, Emerita. Revista de lingüística y filología clásica, 86/2, 2018, p. 370-374 ;
- Alain Blanc, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, 113/2, 2018, p. 204-207.

This paper deals with certain aspects of accentuation of the Čakavian dialect of Blato on the island of Korčula from a historical and wider dialectological perspective. The material in the paper is based completely on a recently published dictionary – Milat Panža ([2014]). The topics discussed are posstonic acute length, locative plural in *-axъ (and the accent of *nasъ, *vasъ), one archaic length alternation in the verb "činiti", the accentuation of the "za me" type and some minor issues.

Балто-славянские глагольные корни, как и все морфемы, распределяются по двум акцентуационно-морфонологическим классам, характеризующимися валентностями (термин В.А. Дыбо) -доминантной у корней I класса и рецессивной у корней II класса. Согласно гипотезе В.А. Дыбо, балто-славянская акцентная система оппозиции двух валентностей является отображением индоевропейского противопоставления регистровых тонов -высокого (на доминантных слогах) 1 и низкого (на рецессивных слогах). Индоевропейская тоновая система преобразовалась в систему с разноместным парадигматическим акцентом, представленную в праславянском, литовском и прусском языках [Dybo, Nikolayev, Starostin ] 2 . Балто-славянская метатония «рецессивный акут 3 ⇒ доминантный циркумфлекс» (métatonie douce Ф. де Соссюра) и менее заметная параллельная метатония «рецессивный циркумфлекс ⇒ доминантный циркумфлекс» происходили в рецессивных слогах, предшествовавших (первично)доминантным, что подтверждает тонологическую гипотезу: разумным объяснением метатоний является межтональная ассимиляцияразвитие низкого тона слога, находящегося перед высоким тоном последующего слога, в восходящий [Николаев 1989; 2013: 153-158]. Место прабалто-славянского ударения (иктуса), определяемое контурным правилом Дыбо, непосредственно зависит от валентности морфем (в морфологических терминах) или от тона морфем (в фонологических терминах): «иктус ставится в начале первой последовательности морфем высшей <т. е. доминантной. -Авт.> валентности» [Дыбо 2000: 14]. В латышском языке разноместное ударение, по-видимому, было утрачено, при этом сохраняется оппозиция слоговых тонов (интонаций). В истории балто-славянских языков доминантные морфемы приобрели неподвижную, а рецессивные -подвижную акцентную парадигму (а. п).

Slovak is not generally thought of as a rich and informative source for the reconstruction of the Proto-Slavic accentual system. In addition to the well-known fact that Slovak, unlike Czech, exhibits no traces of the Proto-Slavic acute, this view is also due to at least two peculiarities of its development: 1. quantity is often neutralised by many later phonological processes, such as the Rhythmic Law and the shortening of front diphthongs after j; 2. Slovak is more prone to analogical levelling and generalisation than any other West Slavic language, affecting, among other things, the development of quantity, whether through the generalisation of length in a particular grammatical category (such as in the genitive plural) or through analogical intrusion of quantitative patterns in derivation. Nevertheless, Slovak does offer some valuable data for the reconstruction of the Proto-Slavic accentual system, such as consistent length in the nominative singular of short root vowel nouns belonging to the b accentual paradigm (bôb, kôl, stôl...). Still more valuable data is contained in the rich Slovak dialectal material, which is neither sufficiently well-known nor sufficiently accessible to international scholarship. This paper offers guidelines for researching quantity in the Slovak dialectal material, as well as shows how the Slovak dialectal material can contribute to the reconstruction of the Proto-Slavic accentual system.