short vowels in Common Slavic

[Frank Gladney]

Alan Timberlake's 23 Sept 10 posting reviews some familiar facts about the vowels of Common and early dialectal Slavic:

>>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 ([Jakobson's] >>“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). […] 

For example, in Czech an earlier /si:lu/ 'strength' (gen pl) shortened to /silu/, but its stem vowel did not merge with that of /dini/ 'day' (nom sg): the vowel of /dini/ lowered to /e/--_den_--but the /i/ of /silu/ did not--_sil_.  How did new /i/ avoid merging with old /i/?  One explanation is that old /i/ in /dini/ lowered to /e/ before /i:/ in /si:lu/ shortened to new /i/.  Another (less parsimonious) explanation is that old /i/ "had become a front jer, a centralized lax vowel" (I'll write it /@/) before /i:/ shortened to /i/, and that /@/ shifted to /e/.  Thus /dini/ → /d at n@/ → _den_, but /si:lu/ → /silu/ → _sil_.  

It is reasonable to suppose that the long vowels inherited from Indo-European besides being long were also tense, in contrast to the short vowels, which were lax.  And since length gives the tongue more time to reach its target position, long vowels were probably more peripheral compared with the more central short vowels.  So /e:/ (jat') was more open and fronted and /e/, which was more central.  So if /@/ was centralized and lax, how did it differ from /e/?

Frank Y. Gladney

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