The Misconception of Generalized Shortening and Related Issues in the Evolution of Slavic Liquid Diphthongs
Ronald
Feldstein
In dealing with the elimination of Slavic liquid diphthongs
(art, tart, turt), Slavic linguistic scholarship
(Jakobson's 1952 article, Bethin's recent book, Slavic
Prosody, and many other studies) has often used modern reflexes
of a or o as evidence of
either a generalization of length or shortening at the time of the
elimination of these diphthongs. However, the behavior of such words
as Polish król is a strong counterargument
to that claim, since the o acts like a long
vowel. A short o would have given modern /u/ only
in pre-jer position, yet here we have /u/ in all environments.
My paper argues that in the tart groups, a moraic
r was always changed to a non-moraic liquid, and
this always caused a lengthening of the vowel as compensation. The
only reason for the Northern Slavic o is the fact
that the rounding of short a >
o occurred before the vowel lengthening. In other
words, the relative chronology of the a >
o change determines the basic difference between
the trot/torot reflexes and the
trat type.
However, the issue is not quite as simple as that. The behavior of
North Slavic anlaut art groups does indeed allow
us to use modern o/a reflexes as evidence of the
original quantity. (Northern art reflexes are
split not on the basis of intonation,
as commonly
stated, but vowel quantity.) North Slavic (including Czech)
demonstrates the original inherited quantity in anlaut position and
the fact that the r never became moraic in this
anlaut environment, in contrast to inlaut tart,
where it did. The non-moraic r made
art an early candidate for metathesis in the
North, but this rule reached the South later, together with the rule
for the elimination of moraic r in the inlaut
tart diphthongs. Therefore, the North
conservatively retains quantity in art
(rot and rat), but lengthens
the vowel in tart, while the South treats both
alike (rat and trat).
The Northern chronological difference in the
art and tart metatheses also
explains East Slavic polnoglasie. In the earlier period, the original
bi-moraic a of rat could be
treated as a long vowel, due to the presence of phonemic
quantity. Later, after the lengthening of tort to
bi-moraic toort, East Slavic was losing the
quantitative opposition, so that toort was
accommodated as a two-syllable sequence
[to-ort]. Metathesis then affects only the second
of these syllables, giving the familiar polnoglasie
torot.
In virtually all Slavic zones, trat reflexes
go with the presence of syllabic r, while
trot/torot reflexes go with an absence of
syllabic r. In both cases, the reason is that
North Slavic had an earlier change of non-mid short vowel to a mid
vowel. The first of these cases is the a >
o change. The second is the Northern change of
high i,u > mid, in so-called
strong
position, which included the position before the
moraic r of the turt
diphthongs. North Slavic experienced this change in time for the
moraic r to be eliminated. The mid vowel created
a greater sonority difference between the new vowel and liquid than
had been the case in turt. Following a regular
pattern of rules for monophthongization, greater sonority differences
caused a non-high first component to prevail as moraic,
(er/or/ar, etc.).
In Czecho-Slovak and South Slavic, though, high vowels did not
change to mid in time for this to occur. Lesser sonority differences
caused the first component to assimilate to the second one (two
r moras, i.e., a long syllabic
r). In other words, Czecho-Slovak and South
Slavic experienced both Short > Mid I
(i.e. a > o) and
Short > Mid II
(i/u > mid)
too late to affect tart/turt, in contrast to
North Slavic, which obtains its trot/tart or
torot/tort type reflexes as a result of early
Short > Mid I and II.
The set of changes enumerated above presents a rather different
picture of the Slavic liquid diphthong evolution. This paper will
argue that it is justified by the facts.