Jakobson's French

[a_timberlake at BERKELEY.EDU]

It might help to go back to Jakobson’s line of thought.

Slavic emerged from Indo-European with a distinction of long and short
vowels that have quite regular and well-known reflexes in attested Slavic.
 Thus *long e gives jat, *short e gives e; long *i gives attested i,
*short i gives attested front jer.  Around the end of the Common Slavic
period, original long vowels were shortened in certain accentual positions
(“conditions musicales”), different in different dialects (under the
circumflex in Czech, under the acute in S-Cr, under both in Polish). 
Crucially, the shortened vowels did not merge with the original short
vowels.  Thus for example a shortened *long i did not become a front jer,
which was the (usual) reflex of an original *short i.   By the time of the
shortening, vowels must already have been different in quality:  for
example, the original *short i had become a front jer, a centralized lax
vowel.  If the distinction between *i and *front jer had been simply
quantity, this shortening should have led to merger.  The fact that the
shortened longs did not merge with the original shorts allows a new new
distinction of quantity to develop in vowels (in some of Slavic).:  a long
i where length was preserved, a short i where length was lost (for
example, under the acute accent in S-CR).   The development of a new
distinction in quantity was strengthened (and may even have been
triggered) by contraction and compensatory lengthening, processes that
created new long vowels.

The proposed translations that say roughly that (quantity was
restored/quantity reemerged/quantity became phonemic again...) are
correct.


\\ Dear Colleagues,
\\
\\ There's one sentence in Roman Jakobson's 1929 dissertation _Remarques sur
\\ l'evolution phonologique du russe_ ,as reprinted in vol. 1 of his Selected
\\ Writings, p. 36, that gives me trouble, specifically the last 10 words (E
\\ for e grave, 'e for e acute).
\\
\\ L'abrEgement des voyelles longues dans certaines conditions musicales
\\ donna aux voyelles longues des brEves corr'elatives, et ainsi la longueur
\\ se vit rendre le caract'ere phonologique.
\\
\\ My colleague in the French Department interprets _se vit rendre_
\\ 'expressed the phonological characteristic', but that doesn't quite do it.
\\
\\ Can someone out there do better?
\\
\\ Merci a l'avance,
\\
\\ Frank Y. Gladney
\\
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