Pronunciation of 'g' in '-ogo' and 'ego'

[Paul B. Gallagher]

William Ryan wrote:

> Boris Unbegaun, La Langue russe au XVI siecle, Paris, 1935, p. 322
> gives this change as 15th-century and says the reason for g>v in
> these cases, despite all attempts to explain it, remains obscure. He
> gives footnote references to Sobolevskii and Plotnikova. No doubt
> there have been newer hypotheses since then. I recall a suggestion of
> dialectal changes of unstressed -ogo> -oho> -oo, with a subsequent
> epethetic v (as in pauk>pavuk), but I can't remember where, and I
> fear the chronology and written evidence of the intermediate forms
> required might exclude such an explanation.

It seems reasonable to me to speculate (and that's all I'm doing) that 
if we begin with a voiced velar fricative [ɣ] and allow it to take on 
the rounding of the following vowel [ɣʷ], it isn't a stretch to see how 
it could evolve through a phase in which the two points of articulation 
became equally salient, whereupon the labial articulation took over and 
the velar articulation faded away.

But the obvious problem with phonetic/phonological explanations is that 
they predict similar phenomena in other forms with this sound sequence, 
and we don't see "воворить" or "ворное дело" or "дёвоть" or anything; 
the change seems to be limited to the masculine/neuter genitive singular 
and does not apply next to the roundest vowel of all, [u]. Any 
descriptively adequate explanation must account for that peculiar fact.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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