Pseudo-epenthetic /l/ in Slavic

[Ajda Kljun]

Hello!
I'm not sure if that's of any importance, but I wanted to point out that 
there is no such word as 'plujo' in the Slovene language.
I could have misunderstood something since I didn't understand 90% of your 
message, being linguistically uneducated, but I thought that you could have 
misquoted something or... whatever :)

Regards, Ajda.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alexandre Vaxman" <alexandre_vaxman at YAHOO.COM>
To: <SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2006 7:16 PM
Subject: [SEELANGS] Pseudo-epenthetic /l/ in Slavic


Dear SEELANGers,

Reading Rajko Nahtigal's "Slavic languages" (Ljubljana, 1952; Moscow, 196=
3),
I found the following statement:
"The soft l' (also) developed from non-syllabic i after labial conso-
nants: i.-e. * (s)pieu [non-syllabic i and u] , lat. spuo, lith. spiauju,=

slovene pl'ujo [open o]. The traditionnal label "l-epentheticum" (inserte=
d
l) is not correct for the soft l'".
I have four questions pertaining to this quotation:

1)Where does the difference between a non-syllabic i and the consonantal =
j
lie? Slavists have always used this notion of non-syllabic i, e.g.
Reformatskij (1975) "O foneme j i "i" v russkom jazyke" (in: Fonolo-
gicheskie etjudy) speaks of three different phonetic realizations of /j/:=

as a [j], as a zero, and, third, precisely as "non-syllabic i".
Is there any phonological and/or phonetic criteria justifying the existen=
ce
of such phoneme? As far as I know, it is not much used in the generative =

framework with wich I am more acquainted .

2)What could cause the deletion of a non-syllabic i in latin "spuo" and i=
ts
deglidification in lithuanian "spiauju";

3)Could you cite examples from other Slavic languages, especially with =

pseudo-epenthetic consonants other then /l/?

4)What is in your thought the reason of this sound change?
Would it be appropriate to explain in by a positional factor like
fortition i --> l'/ C.___ where . is a syllabic boundary?

Finall, what literature could you recommend on these topics?

Best,

Alex Vaxman,
PhD student,
Laboratoire Parole et Langage,
Aix en Provence, France

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