Talk:Slevan
Unresolved questions with the revision of Slevan
(for the two Jans primarily)
I have been thinking of how best to map the Vulgar Latin and Common Slavic vowel systems to each other. As Jan van Steenbergen pointed out to me it's quite unrealistic that VL ē maps to CS *ě and VL ĕ to CS *e; rather it should be the other way around with VL ĕ eventually becoming je, or to state it abstractly vowel quality should be more important than vowel quantity in the mapping of VL to CS!
OTOH I do think it's realistic to have VL ō become u since in CS *u2 developed from *ō which in turn developed from *au, and VL au in fact merged with ō, so that the product of this merger could have been qualitatively identified with CS *ō < *au before this was raised to [u].
I'm now quite certain that unstressed VL ē and ō merge with ĭ and ŭ (*ь and *ъ) respectively -- except in absolute final position, since I need to "preserve" certain endings, notably the ablative singular of the second declension, the first person singular present indicative of verbs and the nom/acc plural of the third declension.
I've cheated with the liquid metathesis, having no qualitative change. As JvS pointed out Mrác's ancestors should have been MORTIUS rather than MARTIUS! Should I let myself get away with this?
Consonants: I have decided that VL dj and gj become j à la Slovene since Slvanjec badly needs postvocalic js. So dz is out; MEDIUS becomes mjej and Mr. Hrodzán becomes Hroján; also MAGIS becomes maj by way of *MAGIUS.
Last but not least I have cheated with the third palatalization and VL ct, assuming c, z in all contexts. Actually I'm not too keen on changing this because I want more cs. What do you think? Is such an over-generalization permissible in a hybrid language? BPJ 10:37, 16 Jul 2005 (PDT)
