Thank you Michael - your concise but authoritative statement certainly
satisfies me. Apart from the detail of the process, your preferred
explanation has the great merit of making -ogo>-ovo part of a more
general development and not a 'special case'. I had forgotten 'vospodi',
which can of course be heard often enough in Russia. I hope Ms
Roebuck-Johnson feels she now has enough information on this topic!
Will Ryan
Michael S. Flier wrote:
> 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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>
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