Shortening, Lengthening, and Reconstruction: Notes on Historical Slavic Accentology

Abstract

The paper is a part of an ongoing discussion on various topics of historical Slavic accentology with Frederik Kortlandt. The topics discussed in the paper are: the reflex of the Proto-Slavic short neo-acute in Kajkavian; the reflex of pretonic and posttonic length in West and South Slavic; the reconstruction of the ending *-ъ in Slavic genitive plural, its accentuation, and the ending -ā in Štokavian and Slovene; the lengthening of the bȏg ‘god’ and kȍkōt ‘rooster’ type in Western South Slavic; the *obőrna ‘defense’ and *čьrnĩna ‘blackness’ type accent and retractions of contractional neo-circumflexes; the reflex of Slavic *ò in Slovak and Czech monosyllables; and the valence theory and Proto-Indo-European origin of Balto-Slavic accentuation.

Keywords

• Slavic
• Indo-European
• accentuation
• reconstruction
• genitive plural
• neo-acute