Talk:Stang's law

Slavic

Stang's Law also refers to law of Slavic accentuation. In Stang's Law of Slavic accentuation, final-syllable long-vowels with falling intonation (produced by Dybo's Law of progressive accent shift) and accented jer's lose the accent to the preceding syllable, producing a new rising intonation called the Neo-acute.

E.g. PSlav. *golvù [gen.pl] > Late Slavic *gǒlvŭ > Russian golóv (cf. Russ. nom.sg. golová < PSlav. *golvà, acc.sg. gólovu < PSlav. *gôlvǫ) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.150.186.97 (talk) 00:32, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

This is now discussed at Ivšić's law. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 08:28, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

bovem

In the word for "cow", why is the Latin accusative then "bovem" ([bo:wem], later [bo:vem]> French boeuf) and not "*bo:m"?. Was it originally a long o: that dipthongised and re-introduced the [w] or is this another anomaly relating to this particular Latin word, which already has the 'wrong' initial consonant? Walshie79 (talk) 15:12, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

@Walshie79: It's a LW from Sabellic, see here. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 08:28, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Even so, the accusative was reformed by analogy, so the Latin/Sabellic form does not directly descend from the PIE form. CodeCat (talk) 12:55, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Anyone know of a citation for this?

As far as I can tell, the part involving laryngeals is fully redundant, being just a special case, word-finally before a nasal (or other resonant, as Fortson has it on p. 63 of his book), of deletion of a laryngeal after a vowel (following the a- or o-coloring, where applicable, of that vowel), with compensatory lengthening of said vowel. In other words, where Stang's law applies to laryngeals, it is just a restatement of the original scenario in which Saussure posited their existence. If I'm right about this, surely it's been noted in the literature somewhere; am I right, and does anybody know where this point can be cited from? The observation would surely belong in the article.--IfYouDoIfYouDon't (talk) 04:32, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Should be clarified now. But I haven't found a source for the law acting on *Vym. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 16:03, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks ἀνυπόδητος, but I was hoping for this article to show some acknowledgment that Stang's law actually restates a part of Saussure's Laryngeal Theory, if indeed I am correct about it, and a citation from the literature to support this point. As you'll know, the Laryngeal Theory posited the presence of segments which colored an immediately-preceding e and subsequently were deleted. →Is that not precisely what Stang's law states regarding laryngeals, except in a narrower context (namely, before a word-final resonant)? To such extent as it actually does overlap with the Laryngeal Theory in this way, it is partially redundant; yet mindful of WP:OR and of the fact that in the absence of a citation this is just my own observation, I was hoping someone could supply a secondary source so that this redundancy, if I am right about it, could be noted.--IfYouDoIfYouDon't (talk) 00:42, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

Correction: What I meant to say here was that what Saussure's Laryngeal Theory did that was "precisely" the same as the much later Stang's law was to posit the deletion of laryngeals with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel (in the above narrower context that is the locus of Stang). Vowel coloring has nothing do to with Stang, of course, although I misleadingly included it in my description of "precisely" what I think Stang's law restates from Saussure (So now I have to correct myself). →Leaving out the coloring bit now, would you not say that Stang's law restates this part of Saussure? (Is that all clear as mud now? Sigh...) --IfYouDoIfYouDon't (talk) 07:13, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

Not sure I'm not missing your point, but... Have you got Fortson? He says (p. 64) that Saussure would result in the same sequence of sounds but different syllabification than Stang – see the fourth example, which was partly reverted with an edit summary that sounds slightly more convincing to me than Fortson. If CodeCat is right and Fortson is wrong, than the laryngeal part of Stang's law really seems to overlap with Saussure.

On the other hand, Meier-Brügger also claims for the fem. acc. sg. *-eh₂m > *-ah₂m > *-amm(!) > *-ām, and also says that fem. acc. pl. *-eh₂ms > *-ah₂ns (nasal assimilates) > *-anns(!) > *-āns > *-ās. The point he makes is that this assimilation occurred "already in PIE", which I take to mean "before Anatolian split off". Given that *eh₂ > aḫ in Hittite (paḫḫur 'fire'), this could be meaningful, but I still haven't found a source explicitly stating the reasoning behind all that. (If Hittite had a feminine, I'd say Saussure predicts **-aḫm but Stang predicts *-am...) --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 18:53, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

Is the last example an example?

It is: "acc. sg. of PIE *dʰoHn-éh₂ 'grain' after laryngeal colouring is the disyllabic *dʰoHnā́m, not trisyllabic **dʰoHnáh₂m̥ > **dʰoHnā́m̥"

But without Stang's law, *dʰoHnáh₂m̥ would not become **dʰoHnā́m̥; compensatory lengthening doesn't happen across syllable boundaries (*dʰoH.ná.h₂m̥).

What happens next depends on the branch. Some insert vowels to "resolve" the syllabic resonants first, and drop the laryngeals later. For example, the expected Vedic development is *dʰoHnáh₂m̥ > *dʰahnáham > *dʰānáam > *dʰānā́m, exactly the same thing Stang's law predicts. That makes Stang's law useless for Sanskrit, doesn't it?

Germanic kept the syllabic resonants longer than the laryngeals, but would the outcome of *-ám̥ really be distinguishable from that of *-ā́m?

David Marjanović (talk) 18:42, 29 January 2022 (UTC)