A paper by Michael S. Flier (Harvard Ukrainian Studies 35 1-4 [2017-2018]: 31-42) begins by quoting Roman Szporluk on the origins of Ukrainian ethnic and cultural identity and asks “If the imagined community began to emerge in the late eighteenth century, when did the Ukrainian vernacular begin to delimit itself vis-à-vis its neighbors?” Flier goes on to quote George Shevelov to the effect that “a continuum has existed from the earliest local changes within Common Slavic to the present,” then gets to the meat of his paper:
It is one thing to worry about labels, but it is quite another to examine the typology of the linguistic systems on East Slavic territory and uncover the relationship among specific changes. The goal is to establish not simply a list of distinctive characteristics, as Shevelov would have it, but to reveal a hierarchy of change and therefore a more accurate evaluation of linguistic data.[6] Thus, we are not as interested in registering Change A and Change B as we are in the assertion that Change B implies Change A and if B is in place it is no longer possible to return to the status quo ante, that is pre-A. My intent here is to make use of advances in Slavic historical linguistics since the publication of Shevelov’s encyclopedic Ukrainian historical phonology three and a half decades ago, knowledge that sheds new light on the chronological layering of East Slavic and thus provides a relative time frame for marking such fundamental typological shifts.
I will focus here on internally motivated sound change precisely because it is based on linguistic data least subject to conscious alteration on the part of speakers. We want to consider the language of speakers throughout Ukrainian territory, especially those at a far remove from the scriptoria and bureaucratic offices of urban elites. Members of this latter group are much more likely to be affected by the need for new abstract vocabulary or socially prestigious speech, desiderata that often lead to calques or direct borrowings, particularly from neighboring languages of power such as Polish or Russian. En passant we might note that both of these prestigious and influential languages have had a heavy steady stream of borrowing and calquing of their own. For now we will forget the self-reflective elites: we will be interested in when and how the non-elite speech communities of East Slavic began to diverge phonologically, never to proceed along the same trajectory again.
The Late Common Slavic speech community that resulted from the great Slavic migrations of the sixth and seventh centuries yielded some major changes that permit us to distinguish typologically the Slavic south from the Slavic north, and within the latter, the Slavic east from the Slavic west. […]
With the vast geographical expanse of East linguistic territory in mind, I’d like to focus attention on one particular isogloss (here, Isogloss 1), one dramatic linguistic boundary line, that bisects East Slavic territory laterally where modern Ukrainian dialects are juxtaposed to Russian, Belarusian, and Polish dialects (see fig. 1). Isogloss 1 looks like the marker of a fairly straightforward, simple difference in pronunciation. In the environment before the front vowel e from Late Common Slavic *e and strong front jer *ĭ (both hereafter symbolized by *e), dialects north and west of Isogloss 1 permit only the reflexes of sharped (palatalized, soft) labial and dental consonants, e.g., R p’eči ‘stove’ (GEN-LOC-DAT-SG), z’el’en’i ‘green; greenery’ (GEN-LOC-DEN-SG), d’es’at’ ‘ten’, p’en’ ‘stump’ (пень/пня), d’en’ ‘day’ (день/дня); Br p’eči (печы), z’el’en’i (зелені), ʒ’es’ac’ (дзесяць), p’en’ (пень/пня), ʒ’en’ (дзень/дня). Polish shows analogous distribution, e.g., P p’ec ‘bake’ (piec, INFINITIVE), źeleńi (zieleni), ʒ´eśęć (dziesięć), p’eń (pień/pnia), ʒ´eń (dzień/dnia).[8] Dialects south and east of Isogloss 1 permit only the reflexes of hard (nonpalatalized, plain) labial and dental consonants in this environment, e.g., U peči, zelen’i, des’at’, pen’ (пень/пня), den’ (день/дня).[9]
In early East and West Slavic, sharping was predictable and thus not phonemic for any consonants.[10] They were either inherently sharped (palatals) or plain (velars), or contextually sharped or plain (labials and dentals).[11] […] Sharped and plain variants of labials and dentals could not contrast with one another, and were thus not distinctive, not phonemic.
But the apparently simple Isogloss1 turns out to be more complex than it appears, representing the effects not of a single change, but of a cluster of changes resulting from the last historical event shared by all the Slavic languages: the so-called jer shift. […]
The presence of Isogloss1 would seem to indicate that at some point, dialects to the south simply reinterpreted sharped labials and dentals before e as plain, but exactly when has not been easy to determine. The orthographic evidence from East Slavic texts is moot, with sequences such as ПЕ, БЕ, МЕ, ТЕ, СЕ, НЕ indicating nothing about the presence or absence of sharping (печи, тебе, мене, село). Indeed, after examining all the traditional evidence concerning the presence or absence of subphonemic sharping in East Slavic, in particular on Ukrainian territory before the jer shift, Shevelov came to no conclusion, but ultimately leaned towards the idea that labials and dentals were not sharped before e from Late Common Slavic *e.[15] But contemporaneous work on the development of the vowels e and ê in East and West Slavic permits a reassessment of that position.
Shevelov saw inexplicable inconsistency in the way that original sequences of CeCŭ rendered the consonant preceding e as sharped before a later i < e, but plain before a retained e, e.g., Rs selŭ ‘village’ (GEN-PL) > U s’il but Rs klenŭ ‘maple’ > U klen. In a comprehensive analysis of evidence of the e > o change in East and West Slavic and the ê > a change in West Slavic, Henning Andersen has provided strong support for the presence of subphonemic sharping of labials and dentals in the environment before front vowels before the jer shift.[16] […]
Relevant here is the most startling hypothesis in Andersen’s study, namely, that the presence of pitch accent instead of stress accent during the jer shift in all but northern regions of Ukraine resulted in the shortening of all syllables except the pretonic, a Central Slavic feature that Ukrainian shared with Polish and Slovak.[19] […]
These developments, occurring at the time of the jer shift in the twelfth century, meant that in all of Rus´, the opposition sharped/plain was neutralized as sharped in the environment before ê of any origin. In the environment before e, however, the sharped/plain opposition was neutralized as sharped in dialects north and west of Isogloss 1 and as plain in dialects south and east of Isogloss 1—that is, in proto-Ukrainian territory. This remarkable fact about Ukrainian distinguishes it from all of its neighbors, current and historical, that might have had any influence on the development of Ukrainian, namely, Russian, Belarusian, and Polish.[24]
He goes into a great many details that I have omitted; interested parties will want to click through and examine the evidence, and I hope those with more understanding than I of this sort of thing will give an informed judgment on the plausibility of the idea. Me, I can’t help but notice the use (unfamiliar to me) of “sharp” to mean ‘palatalized’; I like it because it’s a lot shorter, but I wonder how widespread it is. It is not, for example, in the OED, which has only “8.c. Phonetics. (a) Used to express the acoustic quality of the high-front vowels; (b) a designation for unvoiced consonants. Obsolete in technical use.” And I thank my old MeFi pal clavdivs for sharing the link with me.
Speak Your Mind