# All Slavic Dialects: Non-Russian akanye



## arn00b

The Wikipedia page for "akanye" mentions the phenomenon in Ukrainian, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian dialects.  

Are there any speakers on the forum who speak a dialect with akanye?   How common is it?  Is it growing/shrinking? How standard is it?  Is it considered archaic or is it now developing?  Is it youths using it in urban slang or is it an aging rural population?

What are the characteristics of it?   Is it similar to Russian?   When does it occur?  What are the rules (or so to speak) or conditions of this phenomenon?   

Does your dialect have ikanye or yakanye as well?

Are there any audio samples we can listen to to get a sense of it?

Thanks, everyone.  I really appreciate any help.


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## Panceltic

Not my dialect, but akanye is widespread in South-East dialects of Slovenian (Dolenjska). I think it's perceived as a rural trait and is avoided by the speakers when communicating with anyone outside their local community.


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## ahvalj

As a sidenote, ikan'ye and akan'ye are most probably not the phenomena of the same league in Russian. Akan'ye lies in the core of the language: every unstressed _o_ is pronounced as an _a_-like sound, even when a word is spoken in syllables. In contrast, ikan'ye is a phenomenon of the allegro speech: it is absent in the careful pronunciation and often in songs, i. e. it is considerably  younger. Moreover, in my idiolect (St. Petersburg, which we consider _the_ standard language), the final unstressed _-я, -е_ and _-и_ are normally pronounced differently (i. e. _Ваня,_ _Ване _and _Вани_ are not homonyms, unless pronounced fast and careless), though for speakers from other places it is not necessarily so; on the other side, _сено_ and _сена_ are full homophones (I know that speakers of the northern dialect pronounce the unstressed _o,_ but I have never heard anyone speaking this way in the real life).


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## marco_2

You haven't mentioned Belorussian here, where akanye is very consecutive and even reflected in spelling.


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## bibax

ahvalj said:


> ... on the other side, _сено_ and _сена_ are full homophones (I know that speakers of the northern dialect pronounce the unstressed _o,_ but I have never heard anyone speaking this way in the real life).


In school we pronounced _сéно/сéна, лéто/лéта, опоздáла/опоздáло, etc._ differently, no homophones (same for _Ваня/Ване/Вани,_ pronounced_ -a/-e/-i)_. I think it would be too confusing for small children to pronounce the endings in _лéто/лéта, etc._ the same way (in Czech léto/léta, seno/sena, opozdila/opozdilo - no homophones). The rule was: every unstressed _o_ before the stressed syllable is pronounced as an _a_-like sound (e.g. malak*ó*, an*á* apazd*á*la, but ľ*é*to, an*ó* apazd*á*lo). So in the upshot the endings retained their meanings even in the spoken language. After all we understood Russian quite well in comparison with the German (in the DDR) or Hungarian children.

To the original question: no _"akanie"_ in Czech (including dialects).


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## ahvalj

Perhaps not a topic of this thread, but one of the two prevalent theories relates akan'ye to the substrate influence of the Baltic-speaking population of the middle latitudes of pre-Slavic Eastern Europe, compare Russian dialects - Wikipedia (+ Belarusian to the west) with Balts - Wikipedia (presumably Baltic-speaking archeological cultures in violet). If it is true, akan'ye in other Slavic areas should have a different origin.


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## Michalko

No akanye in Slovak, but in some dialects, ä, pronounced as e by most people today, is instead pronounced as a. So mäso (mæso in the traditional pronounciation, meso by most speakers) gets pronounced as maso (like in Czech) by some people.


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## ahvalj

Concerning the origin of the East Slavic akan'ye. The major obstacle is that there are no ancient documents reflecting the actual speech of the areas where this phenomenon appears today, so it is impossible to decide whether the late medieval texts with _a_ in place of _o_ reflect (a) the initial development of this phenomenon, or (b) its penetration into the dialects of the scribes from a narrower area, or simply (c) the drop in the level of education. For example, the Old Novgorod vernacular speech (known from the birch bark manuscripts) has turned out to be very different from the standard written language of the first centuries of the last millennium, but only faint signs of this could be found in the official texts (laws, chronicles, church literature) written in Novgorod.

Also, it is important that akany'e (and yakan'ye and ikan'ye) are not related directly to the vowel reduction: for example in the old Belarusian standard language (e. g. in the radio records of the 20–50's), the unstressed _o_ and _e_ become _a_ and _ʲa_ but don't undergo any serious reduction in quantity (modern Belarusians mostly pronounce unstressed _a_ like modern Russians do).

Also, there are several types of akan'ye in the dialects, e. g. in some of them it depends on the surrounding vowels, in others doesn't, and there is disagreement which one should be considered original.

I personally think that the merger of unstressed _a_ and _o_ must postdate the East Slavic development _ъ>o,_ because I have never read that in any dialect the unstressed _o_ resulting from _ъ_ has not merged with the basic unstressed _o, _i. e. that _поставити>поставить_ and _съставити>составить_ have different vowels in the prefix. The Baltic substrate theory in its most straightforward variant implies that, unlike in other Slavic areas, the unstressed Late Common Slavic _*a_ didn't become _o_ and, when the old _*ā_ shortened in unstressed position, both _a_'s (the originally short and the newly shortened) simply merged (i. e. Nom. Sg. _*sēna_ and Gen. Sg. _*sēnā_ merged directly into the modern Nom./Gen. Sg. [се́на]). This, however, leaves unexplained why _ъ>о_ merged with _a_ instead of remaining on the _o_ stage and filling the gap in the unstressed vocalism. In the more moderate substrate scenario, the Baltic heritage may have induced the open pronunciation of _o_ (and _e_), which later developed into akan'ye and yakan'ye as we know it.


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## arn00b

Thanks, @ahvalj.  This has been very informative.



ahvalj said:


> Also, it is important that akany'e (and yakan'ye and ikan'ye) are not related directly to the vowel reduction: for example in the old Belarusian standard language (e. g. in the radio records of the 20–50's), the unstressed _o_ and _e_ become _a_ and _ʲa_ but don't undergo any serious reduction in quantity (modern Belarusians mostly pronounce unstressed _a_ like modern Russians do).



This is interesting.  So does that mean that 20's - 50's Belarusian made no difference between, for example, an etymological a and an unstressed o?   How would something like "горад" be pronounced?  (Is this a good example?)

What happened after the 50's?  Did the "shifted" vowels become reduced through "normal" language evolution or was it through indirect (neighbors) or direct (government reforms) Russian influence?

Could this phenomenon (akan'ye without reduction in quality) be described as a vowel shift or is that too simplistic? 

If I understand this correctly, then the akan'ye (and ikan'ye) and the vowel reduction are two separate phenomena that occurred at two different time periods.  Could the same have occurred in Russian?


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## ahvalj

Well, as far as I understand, no akany'e idiolect makes difference between unstressed _a_ and _o_ of any origin.

The lack of reduction in Belarusian is prescribed by the normative grammar, though I never could figure out why real people I heard in the media didn't speak this way. I have finally discovered this Belarusian pronunciation when listening this series of programs: На хвалі Свабоды (the anniversary programs of the Belarusian service of the American propagandistic radio "Freedom/Free Europe" dedicated to fifty years of its history). Of course, there is this artificial articulation of that time, but when comparing the speech of the emigrants vs. that of their Belarusian contemporaries (there are examples of both), or (e. g. in the program of 1954) the voice of one of their female announcers then and in the early 2000's vs. the speech of their modern hosts, the difference becomes rather obvious. Some of their announcers were emigrants from the western part of Belarus that was under Polish control in the interwar period (annexed in 1920–1921 by Poland from the Soviets and then reacquired in 1939 by the USSR), so this could explain that their Belarusian was subject of different standardization than in the Soviet part (my Russian ear hears a noticeable foreign accent in them but no foreign accent in the fragments of the Soviet Belarusian broadcast of that time). Modern Belarusians from both former parts of the country (cp. the modern voices in the same files) still may pronounce the unstressed _a_ clearer than many Russians do, but it is no more a longer, emphatic sound as in those records. This radio, however, has two modern announcers, one native of Poland [Максімюк], other native of the USA [Данчык], who still have this clear unstressed _a _and the overall foreign accent.

So, I think that (a) the Polish Belarusian pronunciation was based on more remote dialects that may have had a different flavor of the unstressed _a_ and (b) the Soviet Belarusian was influenced by Russian (that is much clearer in Ukrainian, whose phonetics is much more different from Russian and where therefore the influence is more obvious).

Akan'ye (opening of the unstressed _o_) can be compared with closing of the unstressed _o_ (towards _u_) and the unstressed _a_ (towards _ə_) found in pre-war Ukrainian (again described in the old books but virtually eliminated now) and in Bulgarian (I usually fail to discern the unstressed _a_ vs. _ъ_ and _o_ vs. _u_ in this language) [the schwa in Russian and Bulgarian are acoustically two very different sounds]. Don't know if the evolution of the unstressed vocalism can be regarded as vowel shifts: that's probably a matter of taste. At least this is not the chain reaction like the early Ukrainian _ě>i_ pushing the old _i>ɪ._

Among standard Slavic languages, the pronounced vowel reduction is found in Slovene (with loss of unstressed vowels), Bulgarian, modern Belarusian and Russian (without such a loss in normal circumstances); of them Slovene (as far as I understand) simply shortens the vowels (only losing the distinction between open and closed _e_ and _o_), whereas in the other three languages they initially merge in pairs when unstressed (Russian also merges three vowels, _a,_ _e,_ and _i,_ after palatalized consonants in most positions). This, along with the above phenomena in Belarusian and Ukrainian, makes me think that this merge doesn't necessarily need to be related to the quantitative reduction: it may, however, slacken the unstressed vocalism favoring the development of the proper vowel reduction as a consequence. In any case, if the vowels are not dropped, there is no way to identify in the old texts when the unstressed vowels cross the boundary between simply short and reduced. For the reasons described in #3 I am sure akan'ye in Russian is older than ikan'ye/yakan'ye and the reduction itself.


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## Christo Tamarin

http://www.promacedonia.org/jchorb/st/st_2_b_izt_3.htm#smoljanski



> 5. Характерна и занимлива фонетична особеност на смолянския говор е и т. нар.  а к а н е  — изговор на неударено _o_ като _а: вадѝца, гòрạ—гạрѝца, кạбѝлạ, дạшòл, гạлềм, ạфчềри, ạтѝде, мạмà_. Тая особеност се среща в речта на помашкото население в южната част на говора и много напомня южноруското акане. В смолянския говор обаче това акане се явява само пред ударена сричка. След ударена сричка _o_ се редуцира в_ у_ (_мàслу, жèлну_), т. е. изговаря се, както в повечето български говори. Интересно е, че наред с акавия изговор на неударено _o_ ce среща в няколко случая акав изговор _и_ вместо _у: ạхàпạ_ (ухапа), _стạдèнạ, кạрбàн_ (курбан).
> 
> 6. У помаците, и то най-вече в южната част на смолянския говор, пред плавните съгласни _р, л_, когато са след съгласна, се изговаря слабо тъмно _а_, та се получават форми, напомнящи руското пълногласие: _вạрêтèно_ (вретено), _сạрềдạ_ (сряда), _сạрèбру, бạрàдвạ_ (брадва), _сạтạрѝжену_ (стрижено), _тạрồн_ (трън); _пạлềвạ_ (плява), _мạл’ềку_ (мляко), _хạлềп, кạлềште_ (клещи).



I will do a translation upon request.

I think Stoykov was wrong. Both these features are not related to East Slavic. Rather, these are Turkish influence. Note that both these features can be found only in dialects spoken by Muslim people.


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## arn00b

Not discounting the idea of Turkish influence, but what part of the Turkish would have influenced this phenomenon?   I'm only familiar with modern Turkish and this language features what could arguably called the "opposite" of akan'ye - vowel harmony.

The slightest shift in vowels, such as Kurds struggling with ö/ü/ı and using o/u/i instead, often leads to complete confusion.  

Not using vowel harmony is considered funny and is used as a joke in some comedy shows.

Turkish is probably the most vowel-strict language in the region, with Arabic on the other end of the spectrum (not just regionally.)  

Having that said, I don't know much about Ottoman Turkish or other Turkic languages that could have contributed to that in Bulgaria.  But I don't know of an equivalent phenomenon in Bosnia.


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## Christo Tamarin

Exactly, the strict vowel harmony was the factor which caused the changed in p.5: changing O to A in order to achieve a more frontal vowel, as those that follow. In the case _дạшòл, before applying "the vowel harmony" tendency, _it probably was _дạшъл _in the past, same as in the standard Bulgarian and in most of the eastern Bulgarian dialects.


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## arn00b

That makes a lot of sense, actually.  I didn't think of it that way.

What makes the Turkic influence more obvious now is the breaking up of word-initial consonant clusters.


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## Panceltic

ahvalj said:


> Among standard Slavic languages, the pronounced vowel reduction is found in Slovene (with loss of unstressed vowels), Bulgarian, modern Belarusian and Russian (without such a loss in normal circumstances); of them Slovene (as far as I understand) simply shortens the vowels (only losing the distinction between open and closed _e_ and _o_)



In the Gorenjska dialect, all reduced vowels generally merge into a schwa. This is also present in my dialect though I'm not exactly from Gorenjska.

So *brat*, *pes*, *miš*, *kup* are all pronounced with the same vowel.

In oblique cases, the vowels are pronounced clearly because they are not reduced any more (not being in the last syllables).


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## ahvalj

Concerning Ukrainian, here is a relevant paper: _Назарова ГВ · 1977 · Аканье в украинских говорах_ — Назарова ГВ · 1977 · Аканье в украинских говорах.pdf

P. S. Ukrainian (including the standard language) also knows assimilative change of the unstressed _o>a_ before a stressed syllable with _a: багатий, гаразд, гарячий, кажан, калач, качан, хазяïн, чабан_ etc. (_Жовтобрюх МА, Русанівський ВМ, Скляренко ВГ · 1979 · Історія української мови. Фонетика:_ 288–291).


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## ahvalj

Panceltic said:


> In the Gorenjska dialect, all reduced vowels generally merge into a schwa. This is also present in my dialect though I'm not exactly from Gorenjska.
> 
> So *brat*, *pes*, *miš*, *kup* are all pronounced with the same vowel.
> 
> In oblique cases, the vowels are pronounced clearly because they are not reduced any more (not being in the last syllables).


But _brat, pes, miš_ and _kup_ are stressed, or?


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## Panceltic

ahvalj said:


> But _brat, pes, miš_ and _kup_ are stressed, or?



Oh yes, of course they are. Sorry I completely forgot that we are talking about unstressed vowels.


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## Christo Tamarin

When referring just to *akanye, *there is no akanye of east-Slavic type in Bulgarian dialects, despite other claims. Wikipedia used the same same source (Stoykov's dialectology) as that of the quotes I provided above (points 5 and 6 about the Smolyan dialect). Despite of the mentioned east-Slavic connection there, both those features are influenced by Turkish - Turkish is spoken in neighborhood, those two features are not common to the Smolyan dialect - rather, they are applied by Muslim people only.

However, if we consider a broader subject, the *vowel reduction*, then there is a vowel reduction in Bulgarian pretty similar to that in Russian. Please note that east and standard Bulgarian shares with Russian the lexically-important and free and unpredictable and mobile stress position.

The *vowel reduction* means that:

the number of vowels recognized in unstressed positions (3 or 4 in Bulgarian) is less than the number of vowels recognized in stressed positions (6 in Bulgarian: A,Ъ,О,U-У,Е,I-И).
a vowel in an unstressed position may have another quality.
Especially, we can observe the following phenomena in Bulgarian:

The vowels *A* and *Ъ *are distinguished in stressed positions only. All speakers, all listeners, always. An unstressed vowel *A* or *Ъ *can be implemented at any phonetic position between *A* and *Ъ* including the bounds *A* and *Ъ*. This is a similar phenomenon as the akanye in Russian. However, no standard implementation is prescribed in Bulgarian. Examples: In the following words, A and Ъ are not distinguished, despite of the orthography: Петър, Димитър, Искър, Вардар, лекар, палав, мъртъв, садѝ (Садѝ го пиперът по-нарядко!), съдѝ (<=сѫдѝ, Съдѝ според доказателствата!). 

The vowels *O* and *U (*Cyrillic *У) *are distinguished in stressed positions only. An unstressed vowel *O* or *U (*Cyrillic *У) *can be implemented at any phonetic position between *O* and *U (*Cyrillic *У) * including the bounds *O* and *U (*Cyrillic *У)*. Valid for more than one half of speakers and more than one half of listeners. However, some people do distinguish unstressed *O* and *U (*Cyrillic *У) -  *TV and radio speakers are hired among them.
The vowel *I (*Cyrillic *И) *never changes in unstressed position.
The vowel *E *in some unstressed cases changes to *I (*Cyrillic *И)*, in other unstressed cases it changes to *Ъ* with preserving the softness of the preceding consonant. Valid for less than one half of speakers and less than one half of listeners. Surely, both cases cannot be mixed. However, it is hard to express the rule when each of the cases applies. Anyway, every word-final E can go into *I (*Cyrillic *И)*. Examples: Both Бèлене and белени can be heard as Бèльъни (definitely not бèлини).


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## metaphrastes

marco_2 said:


> You haven't mentioned Belorussian here, where akanye is very consecutive and even reflected in spelling.


Now a question: are there in Belorussian cases of unwritten akanye, that is, not reflected in spelling?
Otherwise said: if all akanye is reflected in spelling, it would in practice eliminate every possibility of writing unstressed "o", since all of them would have been written as "a". A consequence would be that every written "o" by need is stressed.
Another consequence would be that the poll of options to inflect words would be much lesser, since even in writing there would be no possibility of changing the ending, for example, from unstressed "o" to unstressed "a".
Since I have nothing but a rudimentar knowledge on Russian, I wonder how actually works the written akanye in Belorussian.


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## metaphrastes

And, not related with the last post, if it is of any interest, Old Church Slavonic, theoretically and so far I know, would suffer no vowel reduction, nor akanye, ekanye or ikanye. However, in many (Russian) recordings of divine Liturgy, it is possible to hear clearly the akanye, mostly from the priests who sing alone the ektenias and exclamations. Any decent choir will have to work to pronounce homogeneously the vowels, consciously, and syllables in general are produced one-by-one, with regular duration (all of this avoids or strongly reduces akanye), while the recitative used by priests favor a more spontaneous diction, and then akanye often appears unhindered, though probably unwillingly or unaware of itself. Probably some would perceive akanye, in this case, as an error.


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## Милан

In Serbian every O is pronounced as O, the same goes for E.
There was one video from Bosnia that was popular 5 or 6 years ago when a girl says 'kisla mi je gloooooooova' (instead of glava). It was really funny.
I remember when we started learning Russian in high school and the teacher said DamadEdava and wrote Domodedovo. We were like WTF, why are you writing four Os?


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## ahvalj

metaphrastes said:


> Now a question: are there in Belorussian cases of unwritten akanye, that is, not reflected in spelling?
> Otherwise said: if all akanye is reflected in spelling, it would in practice eliminate every possibility of writing unstressed "o", since all of them would have been written as "a". A consequence would be that every written "o" by need is stressed.
> Another consequence would be that the poll of options to inflect words would be much lesser, since even in writing there would be no possibility of changing the ending, for example, from unstressed "o" to unstressed "a".
> Since I have nothing but a rudimentar knowledge on Russian, I wonder how actually works the written akanye in Belorussian.


The Belarusian orthography works exactly as you have written (except in some loanwords). _See Marchant C · 2004 · Fundamentals of modern Belarusian_ — Marchant C · 2004 · Fundamentals of modern Belarusian.pdf The only thing that every foreigner tends to forget when discussing in the Internet the consequences of the Russian and Belarusian vowel reduction is that East Slavic has _many_ word forms with stressed endings.


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## ahvalj

metaphrastes said:


> And, not related with the last post, if it is of any interest, Old Church Slavonic, theoretically and so far I know, would suffer no vowel reduction, nor akanye, ekanye or ikanye. However, in many (Russian) recordings of divine Liturgy, it is possible to hear clearly the akanye, mostly from the priests who sing alone the ektenias and exclamations. Any decent choir will have to work to pronounce homogeneously the vowels, consciously, and syllables in general are produced one-by-one, with regular duration (all of this avoids or strongly reduces akanye), while the recitative used by priests favor a more spontaneous diction, and then akanye often appears unhindered, though probably unwillingly or unaware of itself. Probably some would perceive akanye, in this case, as an error.


Yes that's true. On the other hand, liturgical languages like Latin or Greek or Church Slavonic are inevitable victims of such modernizations and accents. As a person familiar with languages, I feel pain when hearing Church Slavonic or Latin liturgy or, actually, people singing in foreign languages, be it opera or pop music. And, to be honest, Church Slavonic itself is the result of rather massive phonetic russification (fate of the yers and nasal vowels, palatalization etc.), so akan'ye and ikan'ye is just one more vice.


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## ahvalj

Милан said:


> I remember when we started learning Russian in high school and the teacher said DamadEdava and wrote Domodedovo. We were like WTF, why are you writing four Os?


I had a contrary experience when our French teacher jokingly pronounced the surnames _Protopópov_ and _Bogomólov_ with a French accent — with the end stress and emphasizing all the _o_'s. Honestly, I think that _a_ and _i_ are much nicer sounding vowels than the general Slavic _o_ and _e_ (whose abundance is one of the main reasons why the Slavic languages sound so dull) and if not the harmful homophony it causes, this shift could be welcomed.


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## metaphrastes

ahvalj said:


> The only thing that every foreigner tends to forget when discussing in the Internet the consequences of the Russian and Belarusian vowel reduction is that East Slavic has _many_ word forms with stressed endings.


Thanks for the answer. Would you say that the stress strongly tends to shift to the ending whenever it is needed to (audibly) distinguish between two inflections of the same word? I had this impression about a few cases in Russian, but Russian stress is so varied and capricious that I cannot say I have some kind of panoramic overview on the matter.


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## ahvalj

metaphrastes said:


> Thanks for the answer. Would you say that the stress strongly tends to shift to the ending whenever it is needed to (audibly) distinguish between two inflections of the same word? I had this impression about a few cases in Russian, but Russian stress is so varied and capricious that I cannot say I have some kind of panoramic overview on the matter.


No, the current stress position is partly inherited (the choice of stress position in Proto-Slavic was automatic and depended on the interplay of prosodic properties of the vowels in the word or combination of words) and partly modified by processes occurring within the paradigms and word-formational patterns, but it doesn't have the purpose to compensate the damage caused by the vowel reduction or the older homonymy (the same processes happen in Ukrainian and Northern Russian dialects where there is no vowel reduction). For example, Old Russian didn't distinguish between the Gen. Sg. _stáda_ "of the herd" and Nom./Acc. Pl. _stáda_ "herds", whereas the modern language opposes _stáda_ for the first and _stadá_ for the second, but this has developed as an extension of the opposition found in other words and is probably meant to contrast the stress of the Sg. and Pl. in general, not in these particular homonymic forms. There are also instances of stress shift _from_ the ending, e. g. while standard Russian and eastern Russian dialects preserve the end-stress in many Past Active Participles (fem. _pʲerʲevʲedʲená, _neut. _pʲerʲevʲedʲenó, _Pl._ pʲerʲevʲedʲený _"transferred, translated"), Ukrainian and Belarusian (and western Russian dialects) move the stress to the syllable before the Participle suffix: it is not harmful in Ukrainian (_perevédena, perevédeno, perevédenı_), but confuses the feminine and neuter in western Russian dialects (fem. and neut. _pʲerʲevʲédʲena_) and in Belarusian (fem. and neut. _pʲaravʲéʣʲanaja_).


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## DarkChild

ahvalj said:


> Yes that's true. On the other hand, liturgical languages like Latin or Greek or Church Slavonic are inevitable victims of such modernizations and accents. As a person familiar with languages, I feel pain when hearing Church Slavonic or Latin liturgy or, actually, people singing in foreign languages, be it opera or pop music. And, to be honest, Church Slavonic itself is the result of rather massive phonetic russification (fate of the yers and nasal vowels, palatalization etc.), so akan'ye and ikan'ye is just one more vice.


Russian accent is quite difficult to hide. In opera it is quite obvious. Especially the typical Russian stressed O which to me sounds like уо.


ahvalj said:


> I had a contrary experience when our French teacher jokingly pronounced the surnames _Protopópov_ and _Bogomólov_ with a French accent — with the end stress and emphasizing all the _o_'s. Honestly, I think that _a_ and _i_ are much nicer sounding vowels than the general Slavic *o and e (whose abundance is one of the main reasons why the Slavic languages sound so dull)* and if not the harmful homophony it causes, this shift could be welcomed.


First time I ever hear of such abundance. Well, Russian has lots of a's.


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## Awwal12

ahvalj said:


> Perhaps not a topic of this thread, but one of the two prevalent theories relates akan'ye to the substrate influence of the Baltic-speaking population of the middle latitudes of pre-Slavic Eastern Europe, compare Russian dialects - Wikipedia (+ Belarusian to the west) with Balts - Wikipedia (presumably Baltic-speaking archeological cultures in violet). If it is true, akan'ye in other Slavic areas should have a different origin


Sorry to disappoint you, but I have to point out several important things.
1. Russian akanye is not just "a instead of o" or "a instead of o in certain positions". It is, at least in the general sense, a much more fundamental thing: an indistinction between all non-close vowels in all non-stressed syllables. Note that by that definition it also must include (and always does include!) some form of such indistinction after soft consonants as well; in the standard language and many Middle Russian dialects it's ikanye and/or yekanye (the latter being a standard at least for the St.Petersburg pronunciation), in most South Russian dialects it's yakanye.
2. There is pretty strong evidence that akanye originated in the south-eastern area of the Old Russian language around the early XIV century. In more western areas (including the Grand Principality of Lithuania) it's attested later (the XV century at least) and, more importantly, not in any of its archaic forms.
3. There were many (quite natural) attempts to explain akanye as a result of some non-Slavic substrate. The problem is, none attested language group in the area could simply produce such results (that is, archaic forms of akanye) after being combined with the Old Russian phonology. Note that another feature of the archaic variants of akanye is at least some form of dissimilation by closeness between the vowels in the syllables, and that's hardly a coincidence.

The similar (but fundamentally different) phenomena outside of the East Slavic area are very likely unrelated in origin.


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## ahvalj

The substrate theory is not the one I find fully convincing: as I have written, it fails to explain the merger of _ъ>о_ with _a_ (at least, we should have possessed some intermediate stages when unstressed _o_ and _a_ had already merged while _ъ>o_ still didn't, which are absent as far as I can judge). Yet, the more open pronunciation characteristic of the Baltic speech may have triggered the opening of unstressed _o_ (and _e_), which, as this thread shows, is so unusual in the Slavic context and seems to be absent or occasional in the areas where Balts were not attested (including south-western and north-eastern East Slavic).

How many non-close vowels in non-stressed syllables are there? Leaving aside the dialects that distinguish between open and closed _e _and _o _(and I can't recall right now whether in case of _o _this distinction ever occurs in unstressed syllables), there are actually three: _a, o_ and _e,_ and, since the development after hard and soft consonants isn't always parallel (it isn't in Standard Russian, for example), when speaking about akan'ye we only deal with two underlying phonemes, _a_ and _o._

I don't agree with the term "indistinction" since nowhere in Russian and Belarusian the unstressed _a_ becomes labialized: what happens is always the loss of labialization and opening of _o, _not the opposite way. Hence the very term "akan'ye".

I am aware of the existence of various flavors of akan'ye (e. g. I wrote about cases when it depends on the neighbor vowels and when it doesn't), but we actually don't know which is archaic and which is not: this terminology depends on the theories the scholar follows. The nuanced akan'ye is not necessarily the original one: it may have perfectly been the result of interference of straightforward akan'ye from a prestigious dialect with the local way of speaking (e. g. many Ukrainians and Lithuanians who are not very fluent in Russian may pronounce the unstressed Russian _a_ differently from the unstressed _o:_ it is a rather clean _a_ in the former case and a more closed and labialized vowel in the latter: not exactly the case of dissimilative akan'ye, but a typologically similar situation).

The pretty strong evidence you mention is (again as I have written) the appearance of akan'ye in the texts. The question is (see #8), whether these texts reflect the very emergence of this phenomenon or something else. I have no opinion: we simply don't know and currently have no ways to evaluate this. I am waiting for the discovery of birch bark manuscripts in the future akan'ye areas (there are some from ancient Polotsk, if I am not mistaken, but I have never seen them published and commented).

The substrate seldom transfers the phonetics of the original population to the new language: it may be so in the first generation, but with time the continuous influence of the prestigious clean speech leads to a compromise when only some aspects of the substrate pronunciation remain (e. g. if Russian in Ukraine stops being influenced by the metropolitan speech, it will remain Russian but with an obvious substrate accent, which is the result of interference of both languages and not the clean Ukrainian pronunciation; if at the same time Ukrainian disappears and this Ukrainian Russian remains the only language in Ukraine, it will simply continue to evolve with these _h_'s, sing-song intonations, not quite open unstressed _a/o_'s etc., nothing of which has roots in the standard Russian phonetics).

Yet, do we have similar (if even unrelated) phenomena outside East Slavic or not? We have read here that the Bulgarian akan'ye is different. The literature also mentions akan'ye in Slovene dialects, what about them?

P. S. How would you explain the faster rate of the spread of akan'ye comparing with ikan'ye (i. e. the unstressed _a_ and _o_ have merged many centuries ago, whereas in case of _ʲa/ʲe_ and _ʲi_ it is still not completed)?


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## Awwal12

ahvalj said:


> Leaving aside the dialects that distinguish between open and closed _e _and _o_


Why should we leave them aside? By now they're exotic indeed (and are almost exclusively North Russian). But judging on the patterns of dissimilation in archaic types of akanye, such contrasts were typical for the time and place where akanye has originated. And the very Moscow speech consistently retained the contrast between yest' and yat' till the XVIII century (not in all positions, of course, but still).


ahvalj said:


> I am aware of the existence of various flavors of akan'ye (e. g. I wrote about cases when it depends on the neighbor vowels and when it doesn't), but we actually don't know which is archaic and which is not


We don't know anything for sure, but we have pretty many reasons for such assumptions. The processes which take place in idioms may be unpredictable yet they are anything but chaotic. Say, if the Belarusian akanye (we speak about akanye in the most broad sense here) is attested later, is basically identical to akanye of the Kursk region, the latter can be produced by simplifying more complex patterns of akanye and the cluster of such more complex patterns lies further eastwards, it already looks like a pretty simple crime scene to me. Other arguments cover the possible development of various types of yakanye, etc.


ahvalj said:


> The question is (see #8), whether these texts reflect the very emergence of this phenomenon or something else.


They reflect the *presence* of the phenomenon (other factors being filtered out, of course). No more, no less.
But regarding the "falling level of education" I must point out that even if it's possible (albeit unlikely) that scribes in some areas made no mistakes (in regard to some local system of writing - since the written language wasn't globally standartized anyway and that is obvious), it's very hard to believe that they made a lot of mistakes in other places but were too well educated to make some precise possible mistake. And we may not have too many Old Russian texts (or rather a not too representative set of them) , but those we have undergo all applicable statistical analyses.


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## ahvalj

To illustrate the substrate theory, let's recall the Slavic loans to Baltic-Finnic.

Slavs penetrated to the modern north-west of Russia (Pskov, Novgorod and Leningrad oblast's) after the 5th century, probably in two waves: first came Slovenes, then Krivichians. In the 11th century, Slovenes lived in this area approximately east of the Volkhov river and Krivichians west of it. Pskov was inhabited by Krivichians; Novgorod by both tribes. The contacts with Finnics were extensive, e. g. Rus from overseas were invited by _чюдь,_ _словѣне_ and _кривичи;_ to capture Smolensk and Kiev, Oleg took _варѧгы, __чюдь__, словѣни, мѣрю, весь _and_ кривичи _(in this order according to the "Primary Chronicle").

Baltic Finnic languages have initial stress and clearly distinguish _a_ and _o_ in both stressed and unstressed syllables: while the unstressed _o_ is a much newer sound than the unstressed _a_ (which goes back to Common Uralic), it already existed in the second half of the first millennium.

The earliest layer of Slavic loans to Baltic-Finnic can be illustrated by the following examples (Finnic substitutes voiceless stops with long voiceless and voiced stops with short voiceless):

Finnish _pappi_ — Old Novrogod _попе_ (_-e_ is the Krivichian trait, elsewhere we find _-ъ,_ _попъ;_ Finnic didn't possess Nominative Singular on _-e,_ hence _-i_)
Votic _kaputta_ — _копыто _(the unstressed long vowels didn't exist in Baltic Finnic at that period, they emerged later after the fall of intervocalic consonants and monophthongization of the diphthongs, hence not the expected _**kapuutta; p_ instead of the expected _**pp_ is the result of the Baltic-Finnic lenition of stops in the originally closed syllables, cp. the Illative Sg. _kaputassa,_ where _tt>t_ after the addition of the Illative suffix _-ssa_)
Finnish _palttina_ — _полотьно _(notice the lack of pleophony)
Finnish _talkkuna_ — _толoкъно_
Finnish _akkuna_ — _окъно_
Finnish _taltta_ — _долото_
Finnish _varp-unen_ — _вороб-ии_
Finnish_ raamattu — грамота _(notice the preserved long vowel in the first syllable; _-u_ is mysterious, perhaps borrowed in the Accusative form? the attested 11th century _daju ti gramotu śu < _the 10th century _*dājū tī grāmatū sū_)
Finnish_ pakana — поганъ_
Finnish _piirakka_ — _пирогъ_ (again the Slavic long vowel; _-kka_ is a substitution with the widespread Finnish suffix, otherwise we would expect *_*piiraa<*piiraka_)
Finnish_ pirta — бьрдо_
Finnish_ vapaa — свободь _(the long vowel from the lenited intervocalic _*t_)
Finnish _tappara_ — _топоръ_
Estonian _sahk_ — _соха_
Izhorian _kassa_ — _коса_
Izhorian _koomina_ — _гѹмьно_
Finnish dialectal _siivatta — животъ _(again, the etymologically long vowel in the first syllable is preserved)
Finnish _saapa-s_ — _сапо-гъ_ (the long _a_ is preserved; _pp>p_ in the closed syllable, cp. the Gen. Sg. _saappaan<*saappasen_ where it reappears)
(also _tuska — тъска, lusikka — лъжька, risti — крьсте, sirppi — сьрпе, turku —  търгъ _(the _u_-stem, cp. Lithuanian _turgus_)_, läävä — хлѣвъ, määrä — мѣра, kuoseli — кужель [*ō>uo _is a later Finnish development],_ niitti — нить, _Votic/Izhorian_ värttänä — веретено, _Votic _koontala — кѹдѣль, lookka — лѹка, _Izhorian _kooma — кѹмъ: _notice the stable preservation of the Common Slavic long vowels in the first syllable; the original Slavic _*i _and_ *u;_ the Common Slavic *_au̯_ is still _*ō,_ not the later _u; *an_ is also borrowed at the stage when it was heard as _ō_ [_lookka_]; _*ē_ is an open vowel as in Krivichian, Lechitic and Bulgarian; _-u_ is different from _-i/-a_ in the thematic declension).

All this, as well as the evidence from loans from and to other neighbor languages, from Norse to Greek, suggests that the shift _*a>o_ occurred in Slavic very late, during the last centuries of the 1st millennium. In particular, notice the Christian words _raamattu, pappi_ and _pakana. _If in the 10th century the newly introduced Christian terminology was still heard by Finnics with _a,_ and the first signs of akan'ye appear in the texts of the 14th century, i. e. _only four centuries later_ (and in the areas from where we have simply no old texts and thus know nothing about the actual pronunciation of this vowel in 10–13th centuries), this makes the theory explaining the merger of unstressed _a_ and _o_ as the result of the incomplete shift _*a>o_ (caused either by the substrate or by something else) at least worth being considered.


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## ahvalj

Awwal12 said:


> Why should we leave them aside? By now they're exotic indeed (and are almost exclusively North Russian). But judging on the patterns of dissimilation in archaic types of akanye, such contrasts were typical for the time and place where akanye has originated. And the very Moscow speech consistently retained the contrast between yest' and yat' till the XVIII century (not in all positions, of course, but still).


But since _ǒ_ never existed in unstressed syllables (the distinction between _o_ and _ǒ_ arose only under the stress), we have  at most four non-close unstressed vowels: _a (dalá),_ _o (volá),_ _e_ _(vʲelá)_ and _ě (dʲělá),_ of which anyway only two merge as the result of akan'ye: _a_ and _o._



Awwal12 said:


> We don't know anything for sure, but we have pretty many reasons for such assumptions. The processes which take place in idioms may be unpredictable yet they are anything but chaotic. Say, if the Belarusian akanye (we speak about akanye in the most broad sense here) is attested later, is basically identical to akanye of the Kursk region, the latter can be produced by simplifying more complex patterns of akanye and the cluster of such more complex patterns lies further eastwards, it already looks like a pretty simple crime scene to me. Other arguments cover the possible development of various types of yakanye, etc.


I started to write a reply, but thought that perhaps I don't understand something crucial, so could you explain me how the existence of various types of akan'ye suggests that one of them is older and how it is relevant to the origin of akan'ye in general? As far as I understand, the unstressed _a_ and _o_ in any case merge in the same vowel and are never distinguished: when the dissimilative akan'ye creates variously open unstressed vowels, outcomes of _a_ and _o_ are always the same (e. g. in _трава_/_сова, травы/совы, травѣ/совѣ, траву/сову, травою/совою_). So, the question is how this has developed?

Also, again, I am not convinced that akan'ye and yakan'ye/yekan'ye/ikan'ye are two necessarily parallel processes, since, as I have written, I, in 2016, pronounce _се́но_ and _се́на_ in exactly the same way, while _до́ля, до́ле_ and _до́ли_ in three different ways: I would expect at least _долꙗ_ and _долѣ_ to have merged back in the same 14th century (OK, _ě_ was a higher vowel, then consider the merger of _полѥ_ and _полꙗ _that still hasn't happened in St. Petersburg as of November 6, 2016, i. e. 650 years later). From what I know about how languages evolve, I conclude that akan'ye is older.



Awwal12 said:


> They reflect the *presence* of the phenomenon (other factors being filtered out, of course). No more, no less.
> But regarding the "falling level of education" I must point out that even if it's possible (albeit unlikely) that scribes in some areas made no mistakes (in regard to some local system of writing - since the written language wasn't globally standartized anyway and that is obvious), it's very hard to believe that they made a lot of mistakes in other places but were too well educated to make some precise possible mistake. And we may not have too many Old Russian texts (or rather a not too representative set of them) , but those we have undergo all applicable statistical analyses.


_Зализняк АА · 1987 · О языковой ситуации в древнем Новгороде: _117 writes the following:


> Что касается стандартного древнерусского, то, как это ни парадоксально, для раннего периода (XI – рубеж XII и XIII вв.), мы располагаем здесь гораздо меньшим объёмом материала, дошедшего до нас в подлинниках, чем для древненовгородского диалекта. Если не считать совсем мелких надписей и временно оставить в стороне вопрос об отражении данной формы языка в части новгородских берестяных грамот, мы можем отнести сюда только Мстиславову грамоту (ок. 1130 г., 156 слов) и запись о покупке Бояновой земли на стене Киевского Софийского собора (XII в., 64 слова). Таким образом, мы фактически знакомы с данной формой древнерусского языка в основном по памятникам XIII–XV вв. — подлинникам или спискам с документов более раннего периода. Соответственно, ниже необходимо учитывать, что для XI–XII вв. наши сведения о стандартном древнерусском в значительной степени носят характер реконструкции, тогда как сведения о древненовгородском диалекте этой эпохи получены более непосредственно.



Thus, the Muscovite texts of the 14th century, where akan'ye first appears (Moscow Gospel of 1340 etc.) seem to be simply the earliest preserved documents written in these areas. Do we have Church Slavonic texts from the belt Grodno — Moscow older than the 14th century? How many vernacular traits do they have?


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## ahvalj

For the Slovene phenomenon enigmatically called _akanje_ see _Lencek RL · 1982 · The structure and history of the Slovene language: _149 (Lencek RL · 1982 · The structure and history of the Slovene language.pdf). Here akan'ye is mentioned for the Lower Carniolan (Dolenjskan) dialect. There seem to be three major differences from the East Slavic situation:

this change affects short unstressed and _stressed_ vowels;
when some dialects change _o>a_ _(otrok>atrȁk),_ their neighbors may change _o>u_ (_oko>ukȗ_);
the degree of perturbations that characterizes the Slovene vocalism (including prosody) very far exceeds everything occurring in the akan'ye dialects of East Slavic.
_Дуличенко АД · 1998 · Словенский язык:_ 88 mentions akan'ye also for the Upper Carniolan (Gorenjskan) dialect: here the shift _o>a_ occurs in posttonic closed syllables (_starost>stárast_).


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## DarkChild

Акане in Bulgarian means "pooping"


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## Awwal12

Regarding the (hypothetical) phonetic quality of the Old Russian /o/ - I just don't see how relevant it is. The whole matter is mostly not about actual phonetic quality but about contrasting certain phonemes in certain positions. And with all the sources we have, we are positively sure that:
- the Old Russian dialects, till the XII century at least, had from 8 to 10 vowel phonemes (if I remember correctly, some scholars speculate that Old Novgorodian might have originally had 7);
- they contrasted all full-fledged vowels in all positions for the said period (with the reduced vowels the situation may be more complex); whatever sound /o/ actually represented, it was never mixed with /a/.


ahvalj said:


> Зализняк АА · 1987


But since the 1987 the situation somewhat changed. The number of written records is slowly increasing (Old Novgorodian is also not an exception, of course). For instance, in the 1988, 2007 and 2015 four birch bark manuscripts were found in Moscow alone (two short fragments, a register and a business letter).
By the way, you shouldn't discard the Church Slavonic texts from consideration. Although they may very poorly reflect the actual state of the spoken Old Russian dialects, the scribes made mistakes often enough to make it clear which phonemes they had not in their speech, for example (the opposite is not true, mind you), or which phonemes merged in certain positions.


ahvalj said:


> But since _ǒ_ never existed in unstressed syllables (the distinction between _o_ and _ǒ_ arose only under the stress), we have at most four non-close unstressed vowels: _a (dalá),_ _o (volá),_ _e_ _(vʲelá)_ and _ě (dʲělá),_ of which anyway only two merge as the result of akan'ye: _a_ and _o._


Ahem.
After the hard consonants in unstressed syllables 2 close (/u/, /y/) and 2 non-close (/a/, /o/) phonemes were possible. The latter two get unavoidably merged, possibly together with some of the close phonemes (and in the weakest positions the total merger is not uncommon). The maximal number of distinct vowel phonemes after the hard consonants with akanye is, to put it simple, 3-3-4-3, and the minimal is  1-2-4-1.
But you forget that akanye never limits itself with vowels after the hard consonants.
After the soft ones, 2 close (/i/, /u/) and 4 non-close (/a/, /e/, /ě/, /o/) phonemes are/were possible, and all the four non-close phonemes get unavoidably merged as well, with various results; in case of ikanye, they are altogether merged with /i/ in addition.

Sorry, I just had no time to reply to everything.


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## ahvalj

We seem to be discussing different things. I understand that akan'ye in its present form is part of the broader set of phenomena, but what was the starting point of this process? How did it emerge? Was akan'ye the first shift that triggered the vowel indistinction and later reduction, or did several mergers originate at the same time? Why do unstressed front vowels merge slower (standard Russian and standard Bulgarian)?

I am still unaware of any works presenting and commenting the attestations of the vernacular speech of the future akan'ye areas. What do these Moscow birch bark manuscripts tell us about the pronunciation of the unstressed _o _before the 14th century? (By the way, some scholars believe that middle Russian dialects, to which the Muscovite dialect belongs, acquired akan'ye later, so strictly speaking we should evaluate vernacular texts from South Russian and Belarusian lands).

The phonetic quality of the early Old East Slavic _o_ is important in the context mentioned in #8. Slavic in the turn of the 1st and 2nd millennia experienced the shortening of some etymological lengths (it happened differently in different dialects, hence it must have occurred after the split of the common language), and the unstressed acute _*ā_ mostly became short (e. g. Czech _dělat(i);_ the old length in Czech was preserved in unstressed non-acute non-final syllables, e. g. _dělán(ъ)_; the new length immediately emerged from the contraction, e. g. _dělá_). If the unstressed Common Slavic _*a_ in some areas failed to become _o_ to the 11th century (e. g. _*sḗna_ failed to become _sěno_), the shortening unstressed _*ā_ simply merged with this old sound (e. g. when the Gen. Sg. _*sḗnā_ became _sěna_). This merger must have created great pressure to the vocalism since it produced a considerable number of homonymic forms and therefore may have triggered further changes towards merger and reduction. This scenario can explain two additional moments: (1) that akan'ye (for the reasons outlined twice in previous posts) seems to be older than the phenomena involving the front vowels and (2) that akan'ye is uniform (it begins with that the unstressed _o_ loses labialization), whereas yakan'ye vs. ikan'ye develop into two contrary directions: _e_ either may lower towards _a_ or may close towards _i.
_
P. S. The Common Slavic _*i_ normally developed to _ь_ and further either disappeared or became _e_ in modern Russian, however, word-initially (and occasionally word-internally) after _j_ it retained its quality and eventually merged with the outcome of the Common Slavic _*ī,_ e. g. _*ikrā>jĭkrā>икра _(Lithuanian _ikra_) vs. _*īskātī>jiskati>искать_ (Lithuanian _ieškoti_) or _*ājiķ-_>_jajĭcь_>_яиц_ vs. _*wajīn->vojinъ>воин._ Since the occurrence of the opposition _*ji/jī_ was minimal, this merger didn't cause any phonological consequences.


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## ahvalj

One more note concerning the Common Slavic _*a. _In every manual we can read that the Common Slavic groups *CoRC (consonant+_o_+_r/l_+consonant) metathesized in South Slavic, Czech and Slovak to CRaC. There are two problems with this interpretation. First, the foreign sources seem to lack examples with_ oR._ In contrast, e. g. in Byzantine chronicles we find Slavic names like _Βαλδίμερ_ (>_Vladimirъ~Vladiměrъ~Vladimerъ_) and _Δαργαμηρός _(>_Dragomirъ_). Second, how could the metathesis of *oR have produced Ra, e. g. _*korwa_ > Czech _kráva_? [_Á_ here was acute and hence preserved its length; in _zlato_ it was non-acute and hence shortened; in Serbo-Croatian the distribution is contrary: the acute lengths shortened, _krȁva,_ and the non-acute ones persisted: _zlȃto_]. A couple of centuries later the falling yers lengthened _o_ into _ō,_ as one can expect, cp. _stolъ_ > Czech _stůl,_ Polish _stół:_ why then did this *_o_ lengthen into _ā_ during the metathesis? It is more parsimonious to suppose that this metathesis occurred when Slavs still had _*a_ in the place of the later _o,_ and that the difference between Lechitic on the one side and future Czech, Slovak and South Slavic on the other is that the metathesized vowel remained short in the former (_*karwā>*krawā>krowa_) but simply lengthened in the latter (_*karwā>*krāwā>kráva_), and the development _*a>o_ occurred immediately after.


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## arn00b

Thanks, @ahvalj for this last post.  

Let me try to understand this correctly, do you propose an intermediate step between Proto-Balto-Slavic (whatever the form may be) and Proto-Slavic's *kőrva, a form which had *a of some type?

Or have I misunderstood?

(As a side note: Your explanations are clear, it just goes a little over my head sometimes)


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## ahvalj

I am not original in this respect, simply authors of the manuals usually read only other manuals, so such hypotheses become known to the wide audience with difficulty. The idea is even more radical — that the so-called "Proto-Slavic" _*korva_ simply never existed: until approximately the 8th century CE it was _*karwā _(cp. the above Finnic loans from early East Slavic without metathesis or pleophony like _palttina, talkkuna, taltta, varp-unen _from _*paltina, *talkuna, *dalta, *warb-iji _attested 2–3 centuries later as _polotьno, tolokъno, doloto, vorob-ьjь_), which then independently developed to _*krawā_>_krowa _in Lechitic (Polish and Cassubian), _*krāwā_ in future Czech, Slovak and in South Slavic and _*karəwā_>_*korŏwa_ in East Slavic (the second _o_ was not identical to the first one since it often didn't lengthen in Ukrainian, cp. _stolъ_>_стіл_ vs. _wolosъ_>_волос_). The very idea that Common Slavic had _*o/*or_ was never based on any evidence: the forms reconstructed since the end of the 19th century as "Proto-Slavic" are simply Old Church Slavonic words rolled back to one evolutionary step when other languages show divergent forms (e. g. _strana/strona/storona_ according to this logic must go back to _*storna_). However, the evidence of loanwords from and to prehistoric Slavic suggests that _o, ъ, ь_ and _ɨ_ were new sounds that emerged right before the first Slavic written records, and, 1–3 centuries before, these vowels had the shape _a, u, i_ and _ū,_ or at least they were reasonably close to these sounds for foreigners to perceive them as such.

The evidence and the discussion can be found e. g. in _Shevelov GY · 1964 · A prehistory of Slavic∶ the historical phonology of Common Slavic_ — Shevelov GY · 1964 · A prehistory of Slavic∶ the historical phonology of Common Slavic.pdf and _Тохтасьев СР · 1998 · Древнейшие свидетельства славянского языка на Балканах_ — Тохтасьев СР · 1998 · Древнейшие свидетельства славянского языка на Балканах.pdf

The above _Lencek RL · 1982 · The structure and history of the Slovene language_ — Lencek RL · 1982 · The structure and history of the Slovene language.pdf mentions  _Wallucus~Walducus_ (p. 39 — Valuk (duke) - Wikipedia) possibly reflecting the Common Slavic _*waldūkā_ (> OCS _vladyka_) in the "Chronicle of Fredegar" (7th century) and _Dabramuzli_ (p. 80; in Bavarian records at around 750), Common Slavic _*Dabramūsli,_ later known as _Dobromyslь._


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## arn00b

Thank you so much for this, @ahvalj.  I'm thoroughly convinced.  I wonder why the internet, from serious to casual sources still persist with the *o based etymologies.


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## ahvalj

arn00b said:


> Thank you so much for this, @ahvalj.  I'm thoroughly convinced.  I wonder why the internet, from serious to casual sources still persist with the *o based etymologies.


That persists not only in the Internet, the academic literature follows the old conventions as well. I think conventionality is the answer — in most cases the user isn't interested in how the Slavic words looked like in, say, the 7th century: people need a convenient citation form able to explain the Slavic words a person will be dealing with. In this respect _gostь,_ directly attested in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic and allowing to deduce forms of later languages, is more informative than something like _*gasti._ Only discovery of actual pre-Cyrillian Slavic texts may change that. I would compare it with the Indo-European notation: almost everybody in the last 70 years agreed that *_bʰ, *dʰ, *gʰ, *gʲʰ_ and *_gʷʰ_ were not voiced aspirated stops, yet this 19th century convention is both familiar and allowing to predict the shape of the outcomes.

P. S. Two amendments to the list of Finnic loans. Along with _piirakka_ "cake" (with the analogical -_kka_), Finnish has the word _piiras,_ which has the form _piiraa-_ in most Singular oblique cases (e. g. Gen. Sg. _piiraan_). Contrary to Wiktionary's opinion (piiras - Wiktionary), this _piiraa-_ is, as I had written, the regular descendant of the expected Finnic _*piiraka-_ borrowed from the early East Slavic _*pīragV-._ Since _-s-, -t-_ and _-k-_ in trisyllabic and longer words lenited and disappeared between vowels in Finnish and most other Baltic-Finnic languages, the type with the Nom. _-s_ embraced many old words of all the three stem types. This also explains _saapas_ (Gen. Sg. _saappaan_) "boot" from early East Slavic _*sāpagV-.
_
P. P. S. And despite all these kilobytes of posts, I still don't think that akan'ye is directly related to the preservation of Common Slavic _*a_ in unstressed syllables: I simply tried to illustrate the arguments of the supporters of that theory. The second predominant theory that _*a>o_ (_поставити_) and _ъ>o_ (_съставити_) first merged in _o_ (_поставити, составити_) and only then in unstressed position merged with _a_ (_паставить, саставить, заставить_) seems to be more justified by the textual and dialectal evidence than the assumption that _*паставити_ and _заставити_ merged first, and then _съставити_ evolved through _составити_ (not attested in akan'ye dialects) to the modern _саставить_.


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## Zec

To contribute something to the original post:

Russian-style vowel reduction does exist in some dialects of Croatian, especially the so called prigorski dialect of the kajkavian macrodialect, which I can describe pretty decently since, while not being an active speaker, I live there. 

There, the stressed vowel system consists of six or seven vowels vowels: _i, e, ɛ, (ə), a, o, u, _some of which merge in unstressed syllables. We may distinguish ikanye akanye and ukanye. Regularly, the schwa merges with _a_ (which, paradoxically, means it is found only in stressed syllables!), and closed _e_ merges with _i_ (ikanye). Unstressed _o_ can, depending on the dialect, merge either with _u_ (ukanye), which is more common, or with _a_ (akanye), which is rarer. The result is always a system of four unstressed vowels: _i, ɛ, a, u, _which are all lax and somewhat centralized, that is, they are also phonetically reduced.

This system is found at it's fullest extend only among the elderly. Among the young, only ikanye remains, and unstressed vowels are not phonetically reduced.

As in Russian, mobile accent can cause vowel alternations within paradigms.

Concerning other dialects, I don't know of any čakavian or štokavian dialect with vowel reduction, though there are some that wildly syncopate unstressed i's and u's.


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## ahvalj

The discussions of the origin of akan'ye usually imply that okan'ye dialects oppose _o_ and _a._ However, it seems to be not always so.

The book _Русская диалектология · 1972: _97–98 writes that [Russian] okan'ye dialects clearly split into three groups: (1) proper North Russian with the very open unstressed [oᵃ] and two intermediate (Middle Russian), namely (2) Novgorodian with a clear [oᵒ] and (3) Vladimir-Volgan with a very close [oᵘ] and the reduction in the first pretonic syllable. The book considers (1) to be the oldest type of okan'ye as it reflects the Old Russian pronunciation of _o _with its indistinct labial articulation.

The same can be read in _Колесов ВВ, Ивашко ЛА, Капорулина ЛВ, … · 1990 · Русская диалектология: _62 — "very open [oᵃ] (resembling [a])" and "the oldest type […] with indistinct labial articulation of the vowel".

This division is also mentioned in _Аванесов РИ · 1949 · Очерки русской диалектологии. Часть первая:_ 63–64, "open shades of _o,_ very weakly labialized, i. e. sounds that can be marked with the sign _oᵃ_" and "this pronunciation is more characteristic of the dialects of the north-west, e. g. on the territory of the Karelo-Finnish republic".

If I understand correctly, it turns out that in the proper North Russian dialects okan'ye means the opposition not of _o : a_ but of something like _å _["_very_ open", "_very_ weakly labialized", "_resembling_ _a_"]_ : a,_ i. e. the condition I considered extinct and only reconstructible from old loanwords. If it is indeed ancient, it seems to be supportive of the hypothesis that the East Slavic akan'ye arose not as the secondary opening of the unstressed _o,_ but as merger of either (I) directly the Common Slavic *_a_ with the shortened _ā_ (discussed in previous posts) or (II) later rather weakly distinct _å_ and _a_ (based on the North Russian situation presented here). This latter scenario may explain the absence of _o>a_ in the oldest texts: if the scribe distinguished _å_ and _a_ in the unstressed syllables, he would not confuse the letters _o_ and _a _(cp. the American _dot_ and _dart_).

In any case I wonder what was the evolution of the unstressed _ъ>о_ since in North Russian dialects of the abovementioned type it is also pronounced very open, as any modern _o. _


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## Awwal12

ahvalj said:


> If I understand correctly, it turns out that in the proper North Russian dialects okan'ye means the opposition not of _o : a_ but of something like _å _["_very_ open", "_very_ weakly labialized"]_ : a_


.
I still cannot get why you pay so much attention to the actual phonetic quality of these Old Russian phonemes. From phonological point of view, the only relevant thing is the fact that they are opposed (or not) and, less importantly, what are their distinctive features (closeness, labialization, etc.). Obviously enough, the sounds representing certain phonemes may vary greatly from dialect to dialect. /ě/ and /ô/ have at least two possible realizations each, realization of /o/ also may vary (also depending on the actual position), etc - and you cannot be sure it wasn't the same in the Old Russian language already.

What is actually the relevant difference between "merging of poorly distinct _å_ and _a _(surely in unstressed positions only as well?)" and "secondary opening of the unstressed o"? To merge, previously distinct _å_ and _a _in unstressed positions have to change their articulation anyway - at least one of them, and likely it was "_å_". It essentially looks like speaking about the same thing, just with minor disagreements about the actual quality of the Old Russian /o/ (mind you, /o/ is nothing but a conventional sign anyway).


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## ahvalj

We look at the situation from the perspective of our different interests: I from the history of language, you (as far as I can tell) from phonology. I am trying to understand why akan'ye in Russian/Belarusian is different from the similar phenomena in other Slavic languages mentioned in this thread — in particular, (1) why Russian doesn't know the merger of _o_ with _u_ (in Slovene, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian it occurs in parallel with _o>a,_ in neighbor dialects, though always more often), which, by the way, is grammatically safer since it creates much less homonymy, and (2) why changes after soft vowels are not always parallel (e. g. akan'ye vs. ikan'ye). I understand that in terms of phonological oppositions it is irrelevant which pairs of vowels merge to form a simpler unstressed vocalism, _o+a_ or _o+u,_ and whether the unstressed _ʲe_ develops towards _ʲa_ or _ʲi,_ but it is intriguing to me as a person interested in the "flesh" of the language.

The first question can be solved if indeed the unstressed North Russian _å_ continues the originally open pronunciation: the unstressed _o_ across much of the Russian territory then simply would have never reached the proper fully labialized _o_ stage and thus couldn't develop further towards _u._


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## ilocas2

DarkChild said:


> Акане in Bulgarian means "pooping"



In Czech "a káně" means "and buzzard"


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## Hachi25

ahvalj said:


> Russian doesn't know the merger of _o_ with _u_ (in Slovene, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian it occurs in parallel with _o>a,_ in neighbor dialects, though always more often)



Can you give me an example of those mentioned mergers in Serbo-Croatian?


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## ahvalj

Hachi25 said:


> Can you give me an example of those mentioned mergers in Serbo-Croatian?





Zec said:


> Russian-style vowel reduction does exist in some dialects of Croatian, especially the so called prigorski dialect of the kajkavian macrodialect, which I can describe pretty decently since, while not being an active speaker, I live there.
> 
> There, the stressed vowel system consists of six or seven vowels vowels: _i, e, ɛ, (ə), a, o, u, _some of which merge in unstressed syllables. We may distinguish ikanye akanye and ukanye. Regularly, the schwa merges with _a_ (which, paradoxically, means it is found only in stressed syllables!), and closed _e_ merges with _i_ (ikanye). Unstressed _o_ can, depending on the dialect, merge either with _u_ (ukanye), which is more common, or with _a_ (akanye), which is rarer. The result is always a system of four unstressed vowels: _i, ɛ, a, u, _which are all lax and somewhat centralized, that is, they are also phonetically reduced.
> 
> This system is found at it's fullest extend only among the elderly. Among the young, only ikanye remains, and unstressed vowels are not phonetically reduced.


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## Hachi25

That's not an example, but let's say I got the point because I expected to see something connected to the Shtokavian variant. I missed that part you quoted because when you just say 'Serbo-Croatian', I don't really have our dialects in mind, probably because_ Kajkavian, Chakavian _and _Shtokavian_ very often don't even look like they belong to the same language.

I can't (and shouldn't) really debate about the _prigorski dijalekt_ without knowing which particular town/village the author described here. Those things I know is that it shouldn't have the _ə-sound _and that unstressed _o_ doesn't merge with _a_ (and can merge with _u_, but only if it was a closed _o_ before). However, it's impossible to make a generalization here as almost every populated place speaks their own variant of the dialect, and something like a standardized variant of it doesn't exist.


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## ahvalj

Hachi25 said:


> That's not an example, but let's say I got the point because I expected to see something connected to the Shtokavian variant. I missed that part you quoted because when you just say 'Serbo-Croatian', I don't really have our dialects in mind, probably because_ Kajkavian, Chakavian _and _Shtokavian_ very often don't even look like they belong to the same language.
> 
> I can't (and shouldn't) really debate about the _prigorski dijalekt_ without knowing which particular town/village the author described here. Those things I know is that it shouldn't have the _ə-sound _and that unstressed _o_ doesn't merge with _a_ (and can merge with _u_, but only if it was a closed _o_ before). However, it's impossible to make a generalization here as almost every populated place speaks their own variant of the dialect, and something like a standardized variant of it doesn't exist.


Does particularly open pronunciation of the unstressed _o_ (not necessarily losing distinction from _a_) exist anywhere in Shtokavian?


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## Hachi25

No, not really. The only vowel that can change its quality that way is _a_, and it gets closed when it's long and stressed. It's not obligatory (it's not even considered standard), but it happens (Shtokavian variants spoken in and around Dubrovnik or Tuzla would be good examples for that).

However, a lot of Shtokavian spoken variants have a tendency to completely remove unstressed vowels when they are unimportant for the word meaning. Although all of them can be removed, the easiest one to get removed is _i_, and that's why, for example, many people pronounce words like _četri_ (or even _četr_) instead of _četiri_, _kolko_ instead of _koliko_ and so on.


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## Zec

> I can't (and shouldn't) really debate about the _prigorski dijalekt_ without knowing which particular town/village the author described here. Those things I know is that it shouldn't have the _ə-sound _and that unstressed _o_ doesn't merge with _a_ (and can merge with _u_, but only if it was a closed _o_ before). However, it's impossible to make a generalization here as almost every populated place speaks their own variant of the dialect, and something like a standardized variant of it doesn't exist.



I realize now that I should have posted some examples_._ There may also be a misunderstanding in terminology - _prigorski dijalekt_ refers in linguistics to a pretty small area between Jastrebarsko and Karlovac, while in general usage, _Prigorje_ is a much larger area. The dialect with akanye is found in a village called Cvetković, described in the book _Ozvučena čitanka iz hrvatske dijalektologije,_ which you can check out. There, a very Russian-style merger of unstressed a and o happens, such as _kotâč_ "wheel" > _katâč _etc. From what I've read and heard, other varieties of _prigorski dijalekt_ rather merge unstressed o with u - when it's preserved at all, since the dialect does crazy stuff with it's o-sounds (would be too off topic to go into details). The ə-sound is found in an area around Ozalj in words such as _otəc_ "father", _sət_ "now", _səmo_ "only" etc.


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## arn00b

@ahvalj 

About the PS *o:  When words like *akuna, *dalta and *talkuna were being used, what gender did they have?  How were they declined?   Similar to feminine today?   How were the duals and plurals formed?  

Do we know?


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## ahvalj

arn00b said:


> @ahvalj
> 
> About the PS *o:  When words like *akuna, *dalta and *talkuna were being used, what gender did they have?  How were they declined?   Similar to feminine today?   How were the duals and plurals formed?
> 
> Do we know?


The Slavic vowels as found in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic are descendants of the Late Common Slavic ones, simply with changes in quality and quantity. Leaving aside some nuances, the traditionally reconstructed "Common Slavic" vowels _a, e, ě, ь, i, o, ъ, u, y, ę, ǫ_ most probably represented _ā, e, ē, i, ī, a, u, ō, ū, ę̄, ǭ_ in the real Slavic speech of the last centuries before Cyril and Methodius (i. e. the exactly same vowels as normally reconstructed for some earlier Common Slavic: the only difference from the traditional view is that the loanwords suggest that this stage persisted until a much later period than previously assumed). Thus, there was no confusion between the _-a_ of the neuter nouns and _-ā_ of the feminine ones, e. g. the Old Church Slavonic _stara, staro_ were _*stārā, stāra_ before the vowel shift. Likewise, around the 7th century the Nom./Acc. Sg. *_sela_ "village" formed the Nom./Acc. Du. *_selē_ "two villages" and the Nom./Acc. Pl. _*selā_ "villages". Several centuries earlier, the Dual form was _*selaı̯_ with the etymological diphthong.

For around the 7th century, we get something like:
Sg.
Nom./Acc. _*sela _— OCS _selo_
Gen. _*selā_ — OCS _sela_
Dat. _*selō_ — OCS _selu_
Instr. _*selami_ (South Slavic), _selumi_ (West and East Slavic) replacing the etymological _*selā_ (preserved in the later _za utra, vьčera_) — OCS _selomь, _OES _selъmь_
Loc. _*selē — _OCS _selě_

Du.
Nom./Acc. _*selē — _OCS _selě_
Gen./Loc. *_selō — _OCS _selu_
Dat./Instr. *_selamā — _OCS _seloma_

Pl.
Nom./Acc. _*selā_ — OCS _sela_
Gen. _selə̦̄_ (the nasalized vowel that has produced _ā_ in modern Shtokavian Serbo-Croatian and _ъ>∅_ elsewhere; etymologically it is a contamination of _*-an_ of the consonant stems and _*-ān_ of the _o-_ and _ā-_stems) — OCS _selъ_
Dat. _selamu_ (_u_ is reconstructed on the basis of the Old Lithuanian _-mus_ and Old Novgorodian _-mъ_)_ — _OCS _selomъ_
Instr. _*selū_ — OCS _sely_
Loc. _*selēxu_ — OCS _selěxъ
_
Each ending had its prosodic properties: e. g. the Gen. Sg. _selā_ and the earlier Instr. Sg. _selā_ were not identical in this respect.

Most probably, the soft declension was already somewhat different from the hard one (e. g. _a, ē_ of the hard type : _e, ī_ of the soft one — _sela : palje, selē : paljī, _cp. OCS _selo : poļe, selě : poļi_).


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## ahvalj

Here Proto-Slavic: Hypothetical names for ancient military units I tried to speculate how Slavic words may have looked like around the turn of the eras.


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## ahvalj

ahvalj said:


> Finnish _pappi_ — Old Novrogod _попе_ (_-e_ is the Krivichian trait, elsewhere we find _-ъ,_ _попъ;_ Finnic didn't possess Nominative Singular on _-e,_ hence _-i_)
> Votic _kaputta_ — _копыто _(the unstressed long vowels didn't exist in Baltic Finnic at that period, they emerged later after the fall of intervocalic consonants and monophthongization of the diphthongs, hence not the expected _**kapuutta; p_ instead of the expected _**pp_ is the result of the Baltic-Finnic lenition of stops in the originally closed syllables, cp. the Illative Sg. _kaputassa,_ where _tt>t_ after the addition of the Illative suffix _-ssa_)
> Finnish _palttina_ — _полотьно _(notice the lack of pleophony)
> Finnish _talkkuna_ — _толoкъно_
> Finnish _akkuna_ — _окъно_
> Finnish _taltta_ — _долото_
> Finnish _varp-unen_ — _вороб-ии_
> Finnish_ raamattu — грамота _(notice the preserved long vowel in the first syllable; _-u_ is mysterious, perhaps borrowed in the Accusative form? the attested 11th century _daju ti gramotu śu < _the 10th century _*dājū tī grāmatū sū_)
> Finnish_ pakana — поганъ_
> Finnish _piirakka_ — _пирогъ_ (again the Slavic long vowel; _-kka_ is a substitution with the widespread Finnish suffix, otherwise we would expect *_*piiraa<*piiraka_)
> Finnish_ pirta — бьрдо_
> Finnish_ vapaa — свободь _(the long vowel from the lenited intervocalic _*t_)
> Finnish _tappara_ — _топоръ_
> Estonian _sahk_ — _соха_
> Izhorian _kassa_ — _коса_
> Izhorian _koomina_ — _гѹмьно_
> Finnish dialectal _siivatta — животъ _(again, the etymologically long vowel in the first syllable is preserved)
> Finnish _saapa-s_ — _сапо-гъ_ (the long _a_ is preserved; _pp>p_ in the closed syllable, cp. the Gen. Sg. _saappaan<*saappasen_ where it reappears)
> (also _tuska — тъска, lusikka — лъжька, risti — крьсте, sirppi — сьрпе, turku —  търгъ _(the _u_-stem, cp. Lithuanian _turgus_)_, läävä — хлѣвъ, määrä — мѣра, kuoseli — кужель [*ō>uo _is a later Finnish development],_ niitti — нить, _Votic/Izhorian_ värttänä — веретено, _Votic _koontala — кѹдѣль, lookka — лѹка, _Izhorian _kooma — кѹмъ_


Perhaps not exactly the topic of this thread, but nevertheless…

This set of words is indicative for the history of the Slavic _-ъ _in the _-o-_stems (_stolъ_). We see that the Late Common Slavic _*u_ (_>ъ_) is reflected as the Finnic _u_ (_turku, lusikka, tuska, talkkuna, akkuna_), but word-finally we only find _ъ : u_ in _turku,_ where this _u_ is etymological (the _u_-stem, Lithuanian _turgus_), otherwise we have either _-i_ (_pappi, risti, sirppi;_ cp. Old Novgorodian _-e:_ _pope, krьste, sьrpe_) or _-a/ä _(_pakana, tappara, siivatta, läävä, kooma_), the discrepancy that should go back respectively to the dialects of Krivichians (that had _-e_) and Slovenians (that had _-ъ_). If the Slavic _-ъ_ in the Nom. Sg. of the masculine _o_-stems reflected the old _*-as>*-us_ as it is sometimes assumed (e. g. by Kortlandt), we should have found _-u/y_ as the normal Finnic reflexes (i. e. _**pakanu, **tapparu, **siivattu, **läävy, **koomu_). In contrast, the reflex of the future _-ъ_ in this group of words is open, heard by the Finnic speakers as their _-a_. Along with the Krivichian _-e,_ this suggests that the original outcome of the Slavic _*-as_ (_*stalas_), at least after hard consonants, was a kind of an open vowel, perhaps a schwa, that only in the last centuries of the first millennium closed into _-ъ_ (_stolъ_), merging with _-ъ<-an_ in Acc. Sg (cp. north-western Old East Slavic, where _*-as>-e _opposed Nom. Sg. _stole _to Acc. Sg. _stolъ_) and with _-ъ<*-us, *-un_ in the _u_-stems (_synъ _everywhere).

In this connection, the mysterious _-o_ in the informal masculines in some dialects (e. g. Ukrainian _Petro, Dnipro, -ko_) may represent a different evolution of this schwa. This may also shed light on the shift of many old neuters to masculines (revealed by their accentual paradigm b vs. d in the old masculines) and perhaps to the vacillation _-mъ~-mo_ in Pl. 1.


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## ahvalj

ahvalj said:


> Perhaps not exactly the topic of this thread, but nevertheless…
> 
> This set of words is indicative for the history of the Slavic _-ъ _in the _-o-_stems (_stolъ_). We see that the Late Common Slavic _*u_ (_>ъ_) is reflected as the Finnic _u_ (_turku, lusikka, tuska, talkkuna, akkuna_), but word-finally we only find _ъ : u_ in _turku,_ where this _u_ is etymological (the _u_-stem, Lithuanian _turgus_), otherwise we have either _-i_ (_pappi, risti, sirppi;_ cp. Old Novgorodian _-e:_ _pope, krьste, sьrpe_) or _-a/ä _(_pakana, tappara, siivatta, läävä, kooma_), the discrepancy that should go back respectively to the dialects of Krivichians (that had _-e_) and Slovenians (that had _-ъ_). If the Slavic _-ъ_ in the Nom. Sg. of the masculine _o_-stems reflected the old _*-as>*-us_ as it is sometimes assumed (e. g. by Kortlandt), we should have found _-u/y_ as the normal Finnic reflexes (i. e. _**pakanu, **tapparu, **siivattu, **läävy, **koomu_). In contrast, the reflex of the future _-ъ_ in this group of words is open, heard by the Finnic speakers as their _-a_. Along with the Krivichian _-e,_ this suggests that the original outcome of the Slavic _*-as_ (_*stalas_), at least after hard consonants, was a kind of an open vowel, perhaps a schwa, that only in the last centuries of the first millennium closed into _-ъ_ (_stolъ_), merging with _-ъ<-an_ in Acc. Sg (cp. north-western Old East Slavic, where _*-as>-e _opposed Nom. Sg. _stole _to Acc. Sg. _stolъ_) and with _-ъ<*-us, *-un_ in the _u_-stems (_synъ _everywhere).
> 
> In this connection, the mysterious _-o_ in the informal masculines in some dialects (e. g. Ukrainian _Petro, Dnipro, -ko_) may represent a different evolution of this schwa. This may also shed light on the shift of many old neuters to masculines (revealed by their accentual paradigm b vs. d in the old masculines) and perhaps to the vacillation _-mъ~-mo_ in Pl. 1.


One more word: Finnic _papu_ (Reconstruction:Proto-Finnic/papu - Wiktionary) : Slavic _bobъ_ — _Дыбо ВА, Замятина ГИ, Николаев СЛ · 1993 · Основы славянской акцентологии. Словарь. Непроизводные основы мужского рода. Вып. 1: _154 mention that it is unclear whether this word belonged to the _o-_ or _u-_stems in Common Slavic. If the former, the Finnic word-final _u_ contradicts my scenario, if the latter, supports it.


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## zvyczaj

ahvalj said:


> Concerning Ukrainian, here is a relevant paper: _Назарова ГВ · 1977 · Аканье в украинских говорах_ — Назарова ГВ · 1977 · Аканье в украинских говорах.pdf
> 
> P. S. Ukrainian (including the standard language) also knows assimilative change of the unstressed _o>a_ before a stressed syllable with _a: багатий, гаразд, гарячий, кажан, калач, качан, хазяïн, чабан_ etc. (_Жовтобрюх МА, Русанівський ВМ, Скляренко ВГ · 1979 · Історія української мови. Фонетика:_ 288–291).


As a person who always hears Gomel dialect, I would say that the northern Chernigov dialect is a common Belarusian language. In the old southern Belarusian dialects, that is, in fact this is the third part of Belarus, Akanye incomplete, such as the sound of the last remains unchanged. With regard to the one shown on the map Ukrainian right bank of the Dnieper, which was a separate Central Polessya dialect (rather specific, can be considered a separate language), but now there Chernobyl zone, there are no people. But just north of perfectly visible as the old people do not have Akanye, and the young are.


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