The plural declension of башка

[gusejnov at GMAIL.COM]

To катить:
Эх, яблочко, куды ж ты котисся?
Попадешь ко мне в рот - не воротисся!

гчг

Sent from my iPad

On 03.08.2013, at 23:13, "R. M. Cleminson" <rmcleminson at POST.SK> wrote:

> As we all know, it is not unusual for Russian words to have competing stress-patterns in declension, one of them usually being acknowledged as standard and the other not.  The standard for башка is to be end-stressed throughout; Avanesov's pronouncing dictionary of 1959 gives only this (though he adds "род. мн. не употр."), which suggests that the stem-stressed plural has emerged in the last fifty years, since he is usually quick to note his disapproval of non-standard forms that were current in his day.
> 
> It is also well known that it is impossible a priori to tell whether unstressed [a] represents /a/ or /o/, and if the unstressed vowel is the starting-point, it may be reinterpreted in an etymologically incorrect manner if the stress shifts to it elsewhere in the paradigm.  This is what has happened here.  One may compare польты (NApl., highly non-standard) from пальто.
> 
> In the case of заря, the etymologically correct vowel is o (compare Ukrainian зоря, which is end-stressed), but this is preserved in writing only under stress.  In view of Bulgarian заря, it would appear that what has happened in Russian is that a Church Slavonic spelling has imposed itself except where the original vowel is maintained by the pronunciation (i.e. under stress). This is certainly what has happened in the conjugation of расти, and with the prefix раз- (properly роз- in East Slavonic, as is again evident from Ukrainian).
> 
> Платить is a slightly different matter.  I can remember "плачу, плотишь, плотит..." (with the same stress-pattern as in standard literary Russian but a different vowel in the first syllable when stressed) as the Old Moscow pronunciation, in the speech of members of the first emigration.  Being highly educated, they would never have dreamt of using such forms in writing, or indeed formally, but it was their colloquial norm.  The infinitive was the standard платить with the stress on the ending; it is of course impossible to tell which phoneme the vowel in the stem represents.  I am, however, unable to suggest a reason why this phenomenon should appear in this particular verb, and not, for example, in катить.  Has anyone any idea?
> 
> The moral of all this is: never trust informants (at least as far as the standard language is concerned).
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