Template talk:ine-bsl-decl-noun-o-m-unk

Is this table guesswork or was taken from somewhere? --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 02:12, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

It's mostly guesswork, but if it's taken from somewhere it's just someone else's guesswork isn't it? I didn't try to create any others because I wasn't comfortable enough doing that, this one seemed the most straightforward but even here a lot is unclear. —CodeCat 02:15, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

The difference is that others are professionals whose published work is peer-reviewed and edited. For Proto-Slavic Auslautgesetze there are many competing theories and it's best to properly source everything. For Balto-Slavic you also need to take into account nonstandard dialects and analogies. I would change:

• dative singular *-ōu instead of *-ōi
• instrumental singular: *-ō (i.e. just like NAV dual, which is itself instrumental singular in origin)
• dative and instrumental dual *-amā
• dative plural *-amus
• instrumental plural: *-ōis --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 02:35, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

• If the dative singular is -ōu, what accounts for the -ui of Lithuanian then? The inherited ending is usually reconstructed as -oey so -ōi is the most straightforward result (which is the same as what it becomes in Germanic).
• -ō as the instrumental singular does make sense from a PIE point of view, but I'm a bit confused by the Slavic ending -omь. Is that a pronominal ending originally? It does look like it derives from PIE -osmi more or less straightforwardly. I suppose it's quite likely that when ō and ā merged, a new ending was needed to keep it apart from the genitive.
• What exactly is the dative/instrumental dual based on? Slavic doesn't distinguish ā and ō, and I don't think that ending is preserved at all in Baltic (where any difference between the two might be apparent). And I think the reconstructions for PIE are generally considered too tentative and many books don't list them.
• For the dative plural, Ringe reconstructs -omos and for Germanic -amaz next to instrumental -amiz, and this seems to be reflective relatively directly in Lithuanian and Slavic. Unfortunately the former has lost the vowel, and the latter merges earlier final -as and -us. So either -amas and -amus is possible from what I can tell, but -amas at least has a sourced PIE origin.
• The instrumental plural must surely be -ōiš then, because of the ruki law? And how did either of those develop into Proto-Slavic -y?

I think that the accusative plural may be -ūns instead, especially given that all languages have -u- in the ending, because I remember reading that ō was raised to ū before n or something like that. I'm not sure whether to reconstruct that for PBS itself so I just left it. —CodeCat 11:41, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I found some referenced inflections in Appendix:Proto-Balto-Slavic declension. I suggest that we either take them verbatim, i.e. list two (or more if more are found) inflections by author one after the other, with different titles (c.f. Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/éy#Declension), or synthesize a single one that will combine all of the endings that are reconstructed by Kim, Olander, and others. In case of the latter, there should be a separate section sourcing every single ending, and there must no be any guesswork/original research. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 17:26, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

The accusative singular can't be -an because it did not merge with the ā-stem accusative singular in Slavic, which was also -an (> Slavic -ǫ). Instead it was -un, with a general raising of -an to -un before the vowel of the ā-stem ending was shortened from -ām. The neuter ending has similar problems. If -an or -un gave -ъ in Slavic, it couldn't also have given -o in the neuter nouns. Matasović and Kortlandt both say that the -o (PBS -a) of the neuter nouns originates from the pronominal ending (PIE -od), and only occurred stressed at the time it replaced the older -om. Neuters in unstressed -om merged into the masculines, apparently also in Old Prussian (all the Prussian neuters are originally final-stressed neuters, like in Slavic). I'm not sure how they explain the Old Prussian -an, though. That is why I moved all the neuter entries from -an to -a-, the PBS ending was either -a or -un but I don't know which. —CodeCat 18:45, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

-ān in accusative singular ā-stems was a typo. For the rest - well, frankly what you think doesn't matter, what matters is verifiable sources. We have sourced inflections and we can either 1) incorporate these 2) I'll RFDO this template and all the others that you created because they constitute OR. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 18:59, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

RFD discussion: September 2013–March 2014

See Template talk:ine-bsl-decl-noun-a-f#RFD discussion: September 2013–March 2014.