User talk:Guldrelokk

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Enjoy your stay at Wiktionary! PseudoSkull (talk) 03:49, 24 March 2018 (UTC)

Reconstructed tag

Guldrelokk, don't forget to add the

This entry contains reconstructed terms and roots. As such, the term(s) in this entry are not directly attested, but are hypothesized to have existed based on comparative evidence.

tag when you add reconstructed lemmas ;) Bezimenen (talk) 14:02, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Accentuation of initial *i- and *jь- in Slavic

Since you seemed to know a fair bit about the traditional accentological school, I wonder if you can help me with this. In Slavic, Balto-Slavic initial *(j)i-, *(j)ei-, *(j)ī-, *ju- all merge and become indistinguishable. Derksen consistently reconstructs the outcome as *jь-. I'm wondering what consequences this has for accentuation, since some of the original syllables were short and others long. What happens if the original syllable was long and had an acute, for example, or if the syllable receives a neoacute? Does it end up long or short? —Rua (mew) 10:50, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

The reflexes of *i- and *jь- constitute a problem of Slavic diachronic phonology. They are usually assumed not to merge, nevertheless, as some daughter languages variably show i- and j-/∅- in a ‘weak’ position here; the reason etymological dictionaries like ESSJa or Derksen’s largely ignore this distinction is because it’s a mess. See e. g. this short article by Derksen, although much more has been written on the topic. Accordingly, one may write e. g. *i̋va, *i̋lъ, as many do – such cases are clear, as original *jь- couldn’t have an acute. Wiktionary does not in principle distinguish *i- from *jь-, however; this means also in neoacute syllables *í- shouldn’t be distinguished from *jь̀- (*íščetь ~ *jь̀metь), as it is a segmental and not an accentual difference; then, it also shouldn’t be distinguished from the (supposedly shortened) old acute, as e. g. in *jь̀metь the neoacute is definitely short. This means there should be no problem with adopting Derksen’s notation from his dictionary, writing *jь̀- for *ˈjI- of all kinds. Guldrelokk (talk) 16:35, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

I was actually wondering if we should be distinguishing them, though. I'm not entirely sure what conclusion to draw from Derksen's article, but it seems that short *jь- and long *ji- can be distinguished for Proto-Slavic? —Rua (mew) 16:47, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

Sometimes. There often isn’t enough data, and the distribution of different forms is not very clear, which is the reason ESSJa and Derksen’s dictionary do not distunguish them, and in my experience these are the main sources for Slavic reconstructions at Wiktionary. ESSJa was sometimes criticised for the lack of distinction. I have no opinion on this. Guldrelokk (talk) 17:24, 23 May 2019 (UTC)