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

Wed Feb 13 22:37:30 UTC 2008

Dear John and Will,

The problem with an explanation dependent on morphological influence 
alone is that it doesn't account for the linguistic geography of the 
development of the ending -/ogo/ > -/ovo/.  In my 1983 article on the 
Russian desinence -/ovo/, I assumed the relevance of the central Slavic 
lenition of */g/ to /Y/ (=voiced velar fricative gamma).   The current  
g/Y isogloss across Russian territory  should not be taken as the 
absolute limit of the phonetic lenition process.    It is highly likely 
that Central and North Russian dialects experienced it intermittently as 
an active phonetic process, with some phonetic environments favoring it 
earlier than others, e.g. intervocalic environments before word-final 
environments after the jer shift.  After the jer shift, inconsistent 
lenition ultimately forced an interpretation of the heretofore 
phonetically induced sound [Y], either as a highly marked, marginal 
phoneme /Y/, as the unmotivated realization of the phoneme /g/ and thus 
subject to remedial change back to [g], or as another phoneme altogether. 

 From the socially relevant _acoustic_ perspective, the low tonality, 
non-nasal, continuous, voiced sound [Y] could be identified with the 
sole low tonality, non-nasal, continuous, voiced phoneme, namely, /v/.  
Morphophonemics could reinforce that third interpretation in the 
desinence -/ogo/ > -/ovo/ because within the small inventory of 
consonants used in "nominal" (noun, adjective, pronoun) desinences, the 
phoneme /v/ was already associated with genitive, cf. the gen.pl. 
desinence -/ov/. Semantically the /v/ was supported as well by the /v/ 
in the possessive adjectival suffix -/ov/-, which expressed one of the 
most common meanings associated with the genitive case.  Such motivation 
was absent in the word /mnogo, /in which the phoneme /g/ finds itself 
between the same two vowels but is morphophonemically linked instead 
with Middle Russian alternants /z^/ (=zh) and /z'/ (/mnoz^it'i, mnoz'i/) 
and thus without motivation for identification with /v/; indeed, we do 
not find forms such as */mnovo.  /But in lexically marked words that 
preserve the marginal phoneme /Y/ without morphophonemic resonance, as 
in /Yospod'i, Yospoz^a, Yosudar', /one can find North Russian dialects 
with forms such as /vospod'i, vospoz^a, vosudar'.  /Likewise the 
phonetic cluster [Yd] realized in temporal adverbs in -gd- before the 
jer shift, such as /kogda, togda, /is found in some North Russian 
dialects as [Yd] and in others as [vd], e.g. /kogda ~ koYda ~ kovda/.

A structural explanation of the desinence -/ovo/ within the context of 
the general lenition of /g/ in East Slavic (Ukrainian, Belarusian, South 
Russian) provides a more satisfying resolution because it can account 
for the absence of /g/ > /v/ in stem-final position (/mnogo, strogo/)/ 
/as well as its presence in other forms (/vospod'i, kovda/) without 
morphophonemic connection.  In the case of the desinence -/ogo/, there 
was morphophonemic connection _and_ grammatical motivation for that 
connection, which resulted in the much more consistent and far-reaching 
reidentification of [Y] as /v/ throughout Central and North Russian  
dialects.

I should note that a parallel development has long been remarked for 
Slovincian and No. Kashubian, which display instead of the regular 
Kashubian adjectival/pronominal desinence in -/g/- an alternant in -/v/- 
(and more rarely -/h/- [Northeast Kashubian only]).   In the North 
Russian and Northern Pomeranian cases, one is dealing with dialect areas 
at the periphery (as opposed to the center) of Slavic territory.

Best,

Michael Flier

On 2/13/2008 11:31 AM, John Dunn wrote:
> Though Borkovskij and Kuznetsov and, more recently, V.V. Kolesov accept the phonetic explanation along the lines mentioned by Will Ryan, others are more doubtful.  Both Kiparsky and Vlasto mention the possibility of contamination with genitive singular ending of possessive adjectives (Petrov ~ Petrova); it may be pertinent that the (ordinary) adjective ending is frequently spelled -ova (novova) in sixteenth- and seventeenth Muscovite sources.
>
> John Dunn.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: William Ryan <wfr at SAS.AC.UK>
> To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
> Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:26:24 +0000
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Pronunciation of 'g' in '-ogo' and 'ego'
>
> 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.
>
> Will Ryan
>
> enteenth Muscovite sources.
>
> John Dunn.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: William Ryan <wfr at SAS.AC.UK>
> To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
> Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:26:24 +0000
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Pronunciation of 'g' in '-ogo' and 'ego'
>
> 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 
> refe
> John Dunn
> Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
> University of Glasgow, Scotland
>
> Address:
> Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
> 40137 Bologna
> Italy
> Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
> e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
> johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it
>
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-- 
*_________________________________________________________

*PROF. MICHAEL S. FLIER
/Oleksandr Potebnja Professor of Ukrainian Philology/         

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Harvard University
Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
*                          

                      <<<<<<>>>>>>

*TEL.    (617) 495-4065 [Slavic Department]
TEL.    (617) 495-4054 [Linguistics Department]
TEL.    (617) 495-4053 [Ukrainian Research Institute]
FAX     (617) 945-2168 [private]
WEB     /http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~slavic/people/faculty.htm

/ 
<http://www.fas.harvard.edu/%7Eslavic/people/faculty.htm>*__________________________________________________________* 

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