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Winter's law again
(2007)
Since I discussed the scholarly literature on Winter’s law twenty years ago (1988), several important articles on the subject have appeared (Young 1990, Campanile 1994, Matasovic 1995, Derksen 2002, Dybo 2002, Patri 2005, Derksen 2007). As the law evidently continues to be controversial, it is important to look into the nature of the evidence and counter-evidence which is adduced. It appears that doubts about Winter’s law are largely the result of four types of misunderstanding.
Last year Georg Holzer proposed a relative chronology of accentual developments in Slavic (2005). Here I shall compare his chronology with the one I put forward earlier (1975, 1989a, 2003) and discuss the differences. For the sake of convenience, I first reproduce the relevant parts of my chronology, omitting asterisks before pre-historic Slavic forms. 1. Proto-Indo-European. 2. Dialectal Indo-European. 3. Early Balto-Slavic. During this period the characteristic lateral mobility of Balto-Slavic accent patterns came into existence. 4. Late Balto-Slavic. During this period the Balto-Slavic accent patterns obtained their final shape.
Erdvilas Jakulis’ thorough, detailed and comprehensive study (2004) is an important contribution to our reconstruction of the Balto-Slavic verbal system. The following remarks are intended to complement his findings from a Slavic perspective. Jakulis demonstrates that the type of Lith. tekèti, teka ‘flow’ is largely of East Baltic provenance. He finds it difficult to identify the same type in Old Prussian.
It is gratifying to see that Jay Jasanoff has now (2004) adopted my theory that "the Balto-Slavic acute was a kind of stød or broken tone" (p. 172), which I have been advocating since 1973. Unfortunately, his acceptance of my view is not based on an evaluation of the comparative evidence (for which see Kortlandt 1985a) but on his desire to derive Balto-Slavic “acute” and "circumflex" syllables from the "bimoric" and "trimoric" long vowels which he assumes for Proto-Germanic as the reflexes of the Indo-European "acute" and "circumflex" tones of the neogrammarians. Since the original "circumflex" was limited to Indo-European VHV-sequences, Jasanoff proposes a whole series of additional lengthenings yielding "hyperlong" vowels in Germanic, Baltic and Slavic, which still do not suffice to eliminate the counter-evidence (cf. Kortlandt 2004b: 14). The reason for this failure is his unwillingness to recognize that lengthened grade vowels are circumflex in Balto-Slavic (cf. Kortlandt 1997a).
After the very well-organized Leiden conference for which we must be grateful to Tijmen Pronk, it seems appropriate for me to review some of the papers, as I did after the previous conferences in Zagreb and Copenhagen. The aim of this review is merely to point out some of the differences of opinion which require further debate.
The loss and restoration of the phoneme /j/ plays a major role in the development of Proto-Slavic. After vowel contraction in posttonic syllables, Dybo’s law, and the rise of new /j/ in east, South, and West Slavic, contracted and uncontracted forms may have coexisted during a considerable period of time. After Dybo’s law we have *voļȃ < *vòlja "will" but *rolьjà < *orlь̀ja "plowland", after contraction *roļá in Slovincian rolåu, Old Polish rolå. The loss of distinctive tone yielded merger of the two paradigms, as a result of which most nouns of the former type adopted the accentuation of the latter. Slavic deverbal ja-stems are original proterodynamic ī/jē-stems. The proterodynamic nouns *dūšà (c) "soul" and *zorjà (c) "dawn" have probably preserved the original accentuation. The other proterodynamic jā-stems evidently adopted the accent pattern of the deverbal ā-stems.
Keith Langston disagrees with my account of the Slovene neo-circumflex. He rejects compensatory lengthening as an explanation of the neo-circumflex, primarily on theoretical grounds. His "moraic analysis" is quite unacceptable to me because it starts from an a priori segmentation of the speech flow. In a strict autosegmental approach, the segmentation of the speech flow should be part of the analysis and not be given a priori. Langston's rejection of van Wijk's law, according to which the simplification of certain consonant clusters yielded lengthening of the following vowel, is based on a misguided theoretical interpretation which led him astray.