Reconstruction talk:Proto-Slavic/cěsařь

I feel that the etymological notes have been written based on mistaken assumptions (apparently influenced by Leiden thinking, as evidenced by the Pronk reference; Kortlandt’s views on the history of quantity in Slavic are very fringe). There was no contrast between short /a/ and /o/ in Proto-Slavic proper, because there was no /o/; the *o of the traditional notation stands for the short /a/, and *a for the long /ā/. Any /a/ vowel in Slavic native vocabulary necessarily goes back to a long /ā/. The old Hungarian borrowing császár illustrates that quite clearly: old Hungarian borrowings (as also e. g. Finnish at the other end of the Slavdom) reflect this original length in all positions. The phrase ‘if the short suffixal */-a-/ represents a late borrowing, after the Common Slavic rephonemicization of qualitative oppositions into quantitative ones’ is especially unclear: it is only possible to speak about a short /a/ in contrast to /o/ after the (very late) Common Slavic phonemicisation of qualitative oppositions, when, under many complex conditions, the long vowels either were shortened or retained their length.

Because this borrowing is not late, there is no problem in the standard explanation from Gothic kaisar contaminated with the suffix *-arjь, whence also the yod.

The question of why this or that /ā/ has or has not been shortened in some Slavic language does not belong here at all, it belongs to the respective language entries. The shortening is regular in words longer than two syllables, if not under the neo-acute, and apparently e. g. in Czech císař the short vowel has been generalised from the oblique cases, while the opposite has happened in rybář. Guldrelokk (talk) 01:42, 18 December 2018 (UTC)