14.4.5.23:55: FROM FATHER TO UNCLE

I think Proto-Indo-European *pʕtḗr 'father' could have become something like *poti in Proto-Slavic*, but in fact Proto-Slavic had a different word *otьcь for 'father', and according to Schenker (1993: 113), the Indo-European word for 'father' became Proto-Slavic *strъjь 'paternal uncle' (presumably from *s- + zero grade  *ptr- + -ъjь). I have three questions about *strъjь:

1. Is the initial *s- s-mobile?

2. What is the suffix *-ъjь?

3. What other languages shifted 'father' to 'uncle'? Or 'mother' to 'aunt'?

*Cf. Proto-Slavic *mati 'mother' from *méʕtēr.

14.4.4.23:52: ĐER(I)VЬ-ATION

I am puzzled by the Glagolitic letter Ⰼ for several reasons (not even including the derivation of its form!):

1. Why does it exist? Wikipedia lists its sound value as /dʑ/, though that phoneme did not exist in Old Church Slavonic.

2. Does it really correspond to modern Serbo-Croatian ћ ć, its voiced counterpart Serbo-Croatian ђ đ, and Macedonian ѓ ǵ, as Wikipedia implies? None of those three sounds existed in Old Church Slavonic.

3. Why does its name (đervь ~ ǵervь 'tree') have initial đ- (see the Croatian Wikipedia) or ǵ- (both sounds that did not exist in Old Church Slavonic!) if no Slavic word for 'tree' has similar initial consonants: e.g., Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian drvo (not SC *đrvo or M *ѓрво *ǵrvo)?

(4.5.0:05: Moreover, why does its name end in -ь if Slavic words for 'tree' end in -o?)

3'. And why does Old Church Slavonic have дрѣво drěvo with ě if Proto-Slavic had *dervo with e?

4. Cubberley (1993: 24) listed ћ (transliterated as ǵ/j, not ć) as the early Cyrillic equivalent of Ⰼ, and questions 1 and 2 apply to ћ as well as Ⰼ.

On the other hand, Wikipedia does not mention ћ in its article on the early Cyrillic alphabet, though its article "Tshe" (ћ) does mention that the later Cyrillic letter ћ ć was based on the earlier Cyrillic letter ћ ǵ/j. Oddly the article on "Dje" (ђ), an obvious derivative of ћ, does not mention either ћ.

14.4.3.21:52: THE VÖWELS OF PREKMÜRŠČINA

Two days ago, I asked about Slovene surnames with ü which I thought was un-Slovene. It's actually un-standard Slovene. I forgot that I read in December about how some Slovene dialects have front rounded vowels: e.g., that of Prekmurje, where Albina Nećak Lük is from (and where Danilo Türk's ancestors might be from; his native Maribor is "where significant immigrant communities from Prekmurje have settled"). I was reminded of that fact by the last line of the Lord's Prayer in Prekmurje Slovene on p. 273 of Francis Tapon's The Hidden Europe:

Prekmurje: nego odslobodi nas od hüdoga

Standard: temveč reši nas hudega

'but deliver us from evil'

I assume those front rounded vowels are due to Hungarian and/or German influence since Prekmurje borders Hungary and Austria. What I don't understand is how they developed in native words. In some cases, they seem to reflect nearby palatal segments: e.g.,

P odpüščamo 'we forgive' with ü before š (cf. standard odpuščamo)

P hüdoga < *hudega 'evil'? (assuming the standard form is more conservative)

Presumably ö is always conditioned (by some palatal segment?) since it is nonphonemic according to Wikipedia.

On the other hand, ü is presumably phonemic because it is unpredictable: e.g., it appears in the river name Müra (standard Mura) which contains no palatal segments other than ü.

The unusual vocalism of Prekmurje is not limited to front rounded vowels: e.g., it has au or ou from earlier *o and *ǫ: e.g.,

'God': Baug ~ Boug < *bogъ

'road': paut ~ pout < *pǫtь

I presume this shift postdated the merger of *o and *ǫ. But why did some *o break while others didn't? Is accent a factor?

14.4.2.23:52: THE SERBO-CROATIAN CASE -GA-ME

Vowel correspondences between Slavic languages are generally very straightforward, so I'm frustrated by how Serbo-Croatian and Slovene third person pronoun and adjective case endings don't quite line up with their equivalents elsewhere. Unexpected vowels are in red.

(I have left out masculine inanimate and neuter accusative forms for 'new' since they are regular.)

Today I realized that the unexpected Serbo-Croatian and Slovene accusative/genitive a might be by analogy with the genitive ending -a in masculine and neuter o-stems (e.g., mesto 'place', 'town') and short adjectives (e.g., *nova).

*nova-jego města > SC novog(a) m(j)esta 'of the new place', Sl novega mesta 'of the new town'

Did this analogy occur

- indepedently in Serbo-Croatian and Slovene?

- in a common ancestor of Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (Proto-Southwestern Slavic as opposed to Macedonian and Bulgarian)?

- in Proto-South Slavic (and if so, are a-forms attested in earlier Bulgarian and Macedonian)?

Could the unexpected Serbo-Croatian dative-locative e also be due to analogy? If so, what would be the model? Proto-Slavic  masculine and neuter o-stems had a locative ending *-e. Were forms like novome first created at a time when Serbo-Croatian masculine and neuter o-stems (e.g., mesto 'place') and short adjectives (e.g., *nově) still had an *-ě-like locative? (Those stems now have -u for both dative and locative.)

*u nově-jemь městě > *u novome m(j)est(j)e? > SC u novom(e) m(j)estu 'in the new place'

*4.3.19:00: Wiktionary does not reconstruct clitic forms for the third person pronoun, but I have done so because nearly identical clitics are attested in all three branches of Slavic. (No standard East Slavic language has them, but ho < *go and mu are in nonstandard Ukrainian [Shevelov 1993: 960].) It's possible that all three branches (or even languages within them) independently dropped the first syllables of the third person pronouns to form the clitics, but is it probable?

4.3.22:18: When I first saw Serbo-Croatian -ga, I thought of how unstressed Russian -го is pronounced [və] and assumed that Serbo-Croatian a was also the product of vowel reduction. But I later rejected that idea because as far as I knew, the reduction of *o was unique to Russian and Belarusian. (Belarusian has -га [ɣa] corresponding to Russian -го [və] and SC -ga.) However, *o-reduction is actually more widespread that I thought: it's also in Upper Carniolan Slovene and Smolyan Bulgarian. Wikipedia reports akan'e (vowel reduction to a) in Polissian Ukrainian whose eastern variety is transitional with Russian, so I assume it has Russian-style *o-reduction (rather than Belarusian-style *o and *e-reduction). Nonetheless that wider distribution doesn't necessarily mean my original guess was correct. As far as I know, akan'e is completely unknown in Serbo-Croatian.

14.4.1.23:06: LÜK-ING TÜRK-ISH

Tonight I rediscovered my copy of Language in the Former Yugoslav Lands. The name of the author of the chapter on Slovene caught my eye: Albina Nećak Lük. Neither ć nor ü are in Slovene. Ć is in Serbo-Croatian (and nećak is Serbo-Croatian for 'nephew' - a coincidence?), but ü is in neither Slovene nor Serbo-Croatian. Lük is from Prekmurje, where "[p]eople of different languages, Slovene, Hungarian, German, Romani, Yiddish, live in close contact for centuries". Is Lük a Hungarian or German name?

The umlaut in Lük reminded me of another name from Slovenia that puzzled me: Danilo Türk. I thought I might have already written about Türk, but Google tells me I haven't. In any case, these folks wrote about it years before I ever heard of him. The first post in that thread quotes this article.

I wonder how the average Slovene pronounces ć and ü. Are they consistently distinguished from native č and u? If not, who distinguishes them and who doesn't?

14.3.31.23:59: "A TIME FOR TRUTH-TELLING"

March 31 is my birthday, a time for truth-telling.

I tried to translate the latter phrase and came up with

1ʐɨəʳ 1tshiee 2ziọ 'truth speak time'

That got me thinking about two of the various Tangut words for 'time':

0705 1ziẹ and 4861 2ziọ

Although their characters are completely different, they are phonetically similar and exhibit an e ~ o alternation almost always otherwise found in verbs. (See below for the only other example with nouns that I know of.)

Jacques (2009) regarded that e ~ o alternation as the result of suffixation. (I have converted his reconstruction into mine; the basic principle is the same.)

0749 *CI-pha > 1phi 'to send, cause' (stem 1*; no suffix)

4568 *CI-pha-w-H > 2phio 'to send, cause' (stem 2; suffixed)

Jacques regarded *-w as a third person patient suffix with a cognate -w still in northern Qiang today.

(The function of *-H which conditioned the second tone is unknown. Not all second stems have the second tone.)

By analogy I could reconstruct the two words for 'time' as *SE-Sa and *SE-Sa-w-H.

*S- conditioned vowel tension (indicated by a subscript dot)

*-E- conditioned the raising of *-a to *-ia and later -ie; it and *-a conditioned the intervocalic lenition of an earlier sibilant *-S- to -z- (phonetically [ɮ]?)

But there are limits to analogy. The *-w in 'time' obviously cannot be a third person patient suffix. What is it? Could it be from an earlier *-k? Or is 'time' a true case of ablaut: i.e., primary vowel alternation as opposed to secondary vowel alternation?

(4.1.0:55: Yet another solution is to assume that the original root vowel was *o and the -e-form is from *-o plus a suffix *-j:

*Sɯ-So-H > 2ziọ

*Sɯ-So-j > 1ziẹ

However, that begs the question of what *-j is. I have reconstructed the presyllabic vowel conditioning later -i- as *ɯ, since the frontness of -e is due to *-j. Unlike *E, *ɯ did not cause stressed vowels to front.)

A pair of nouns with a similar alternation* is

1591 2nie 'language' and 1824 2nwio 'word'

Is the semantic difference between those nouns comparable to that between the two words for 'time' (e.g., time as a whole vs. a point in time)? Tangut has many apparent synonyms whose distinctions are not yet fully understood.

*Jacques (2009: 3) explained the difference between stems 1 and 2:

Stem 2 is used when the verb’s subject (that is, A for a transitive verb or S for an intransitive one) is 1Sg or 2Sg and the patient is third person (Gong 2001:26). Stem 1 occurs in all other cases, including those when a 1sg or 2sg agreement suffix appears but is coreferent with the patient of the verb (Gong 2001:32-34).

**4.1.1:00: Unlike the words for 'time', 'language' and 'word' share the same tone, and 'word' has a medial -w- conditioned by a *P-prefix.

14.3.30.18:07: YERNAZ RAMAUTARSING

I first heard about Yernaz Ramautarsing today through Bosch Fawstin. I've been trying to find the derivation of his name.

Ramautarsing is a Hindi compound of three elements of Sanskrit origin:

राम Rām 'Rama'

औतार autār 'avatar'

सिंह Siṃh 'lion'

When I Googled Yernaz, the results not involving Ramautarsing were mostly ... Kazakh! According to name.kazakh.ru, ер yer is 'hero'* and наз naz is a loan from Persian (presumably ناز nāz 'glory'). Did this Turco-Persian hybrid spread into India before arriving in Suriname where Ramautarsing was born?

*I'm surprised I can't find the Kazakh word in this entry for Proto-Turkic *ēr 'man'. (Also see Clauson 1972: 192.)

14.3.30.6:06: A KHIOOR-IOUS KHAN-UNDRUM

There are only three tangraphs with the element vai:

=+

1018 1lwo 'moist' (vemvai) =

left of 0642 2lõ 'origin' (vemjolcon; phonetic) +

center of 3052 1niooʳ 'water (trigram ☵)' (cirvaigii; semantic)

=++

3052 1niooʳ 'water (trigram ☵)' (cirvaigii) =

left of 3058 2ziəəʳ 'water' (cirzaa; semantic) +

right of 1018 1lwo 'moist' (vemvai; semantic) +

right of 5941 1diə̣ 'strip' (pargii; why?)

=+

4754 1khiooʳ (Sanskrit transcription) (biobuxvai) =

top and left of 4807 1khi 'to lose' (biobuxpik; initial) +

center of 3052 1niooʳ 'water (trigram ☵)' (cirvaigii; rhyme)

As I wrote in my last entry, 1018 "is clearly a phonosemantic compound," though I don't understand why its semantic component is vai instead of the much more common radical cir 'water'.

3052 is probably a semantic compound. 5941 'strip' might be a reference to how trigrams look like strips, though its components par and gii are absent from the tangraphs for the seven other trigram names:

3950 1tshwiu 'heaven (☰)' (girdexgie)

3389 2ŋiõ 'mountain (☶)' (dexfei)

2777 1ŋeʳw 'thunder (☳)' (dexdukcin)

1995 2məi 'wind (☴)' (biidexdak)

4555 1pə 'fire (☲)' (qeucok)

3910 1phəu 'earth (☷)' (girges)

1976 2bie 'swamp (☱)' (baebeldexbel)

4754 is a fanqie character for Sanskrit transcription according to both the Tangraphic Sea and Homophones. I would expect it to transcribe a Sanskrit phoneme sequence khyor [kʰjoːr] corresponding to its reading 1khiooʳ. However, the only Sanskrit khyor I know of is the genitive and locative dual of sakhi- 'friend', its compounds, and a few rare -khi nouns before a voiced segment. Would the Tangut really create a special tangraph for such forms? Or am I overlooking a common verb form, dharani, or mantra with khyor?

Perhaps my slight rewriting of Gong's Tangut reconstruction is wrong. Arakawa (1997: 149) reconstructed 4754 as khya:n. Monier-Williams' Sanskrit dictionary has 156 nouns with -khyān-; 124 end in khyāna-. However, according to Arakawa (1997: 117), 4754 transcribed Sanskrit khan and khyan, not khyān! That is hard to reconcile with the Chinese transcription 娘 *ndʐɨo for 3052 which rhymes with 4754. The only way out I can see is to reconstruct a -(y)an-like reading which shifted to an -o-like reading by 1190 when 3052 was transcribed in the Pearl.