Reconstruction talk:Proto-Slavic/bogъ

Winter's law

The Wikipedia article that is linked to says that Winter's law applies only in closed syllables and only with unaspirated voiced stops. The syllable here is clearly not closed... I know that Proto-Slavic only has open syllables, but any inherited closed syllables are resolved by deleting the consonants at the end of the syllable, not the ones at the beginning of the next. (As far as I can see, that means that all consonants that could have triggered the law must disappear in Proto-Slavic.) And in any case there is no reason why the consonant could not be a voiced aspirate, so that point is kind of moot anyway. —CodeCat 17:11, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Well that's one formulation of Winter's law (used in Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben), there are others. Every formulation has many exceptions which are then more or less convincingly explained away (like in this way, as *bogъ being an Iranian borrowing). Since we are not supposed to take sides, it is certainly worth mentioning.

I don't get the part about consonant deletion - what does this have to do with anything?

If we had PIE *gʰ instead of *g, wouldn't Grassman's law then yield Sanskrit *bagh- instead of *bhag- ? --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 18:39, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

About consonant deletion. If Winter's law applies only to closed syllables (ignoring whether that is true or not, let's assume the case that it is), then the original Balto-Slavic syllable shape of any stem that underwent the law must have been CVCCV-, that is, *bagCV-. But in such a word, the first -C- (that is, the -g-) is always deleted in Proto-Slavic, because Proto-Slavic normally deletes any consonants that can't be shifted onto the onset next syllable. So under that formulation of Winter's law, the consonants that trigger the law will always disappear in Slavic, in much the same way as the accent distinctions triggering Verner's law in Germanic disappeared without attestation afterwards.

Grassmann's law is not a PIE sound law. It certainly didn't apply in Germanic, so there is no pressing need to assume it applied to Balto-Slavic. Of course, if it did and there is linguistic concensus that it did, then I just didn't know. In Sanskrit it applied, so it would have caused the change, yes, but I meant the part that is in the etymology: the Balto-Slavic root shape (pre-Winter's law) and not the Sanskrit one. In Balto-Slavic, two aspirates could have been in the same root without any problems, and an earlier bʰagʰ-/bʰogʰ- could have given Proto-Balto-Slavic *bag- easily. So the etymology argues that the absence of Winter's law means that this can't be an inherited word, but there are two cases in which it can be inherited like I showed: if Winter's law applies only to closed syllables, and/or if the second consonant was an aspirate. Which means that the argument given doesn't really hold much weight at all. —CodeCat 19:04, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

There was no such dropped consonant because it would've been preserved in Indo-Iranian. Grassman's law did apply to Sanskrit, so PIE bʰagʰ-/bʰogʰ- couldn't have given Sanskrit *bhag-, which is an obvious cognate. I also toned down the WP article on Winter's law - blocking conditions are still a matter of dispute AFAIK. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 20:01, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Turkic source

Dear IP, I suggest you reread your references carefully and with understanding. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 13:35, 17 November 2013 (UTC)