Appendix talk:Proto-Slavic nouns/Vegetation

- I added something from Pokorny. Main problem is, that a lot of these vegetal terms are (today) scholarly. To me often happens, that I have heard not a czech word :-) Stephen, I'm happy, that you are doing there the russian section.

- I also connected the prothetic consonats roundly to the word.

Večerka, Základy slovanské filologie, page 13:
 * Prothetic j- evolved steadily in the words beginning with *e-, *ę-, *ь- (see slav. jest, but latin est; slav. jęti, jьmǫ but lith. imti)...

Večerka, Staroslověnština, page 43:
 * ...except: "ei" (yes), "eterъ" (whoever), "ese" (lo, see!) and "eda" (lest).

Večerka, Základy slovanské filologie, page 13:
 * Prothetic v- evolved steadily in the words beginning with *ъ- and perhaps also *y- (see slav. vydra, but lith. údra, where slavic "y" matches lith. "ú"...) H.patera 20:36, 22 March 2008 (UTC)


 * For Croatian (also Bosnian/Serbian and partially Slovenian) one can use - it also also contains wealth of dialectal material, from scanned books compiled in 18th/19th century, which preserve some of the PSL. forms more conservatively than innovative neoštokavian dialelct BCS are based on. Some of the stuff in there looks fascinating, I was always amazed with the "free style" used in vernacular. Once again, for those interested, I'd like to point out the possibility of creating separate articles in Appendix: namespace (see Category:Proto-Slavic nouns), which don't have space limitations - dialectalisms, accents, declensions, onomastics...everything is acceptable in there :)


 * Word-initial *j-, *v- could arise for various reasons, either prothetically to satisfy law by which words (all except pronouns, conjunctions and particles) couldn't start with a a certain vowel (*j- for front vowels, *w- for back), or more economically as a reflection of PIE/BSl. laryngeal - *h₁esti gave Latin est but BSL. *(H)esti > LPSL. *jestь. It is not clear what happens with *H in front of long and short EPSL. *a, since there are multiple attestions even in OCS for ablъko/jablъko, aję/jaję etc. One can argue, however, that j- was always there in pronunciation, just that it wasn't written (esp. in Glagolitic in which yat was used also for /ja/, and e also for /je/ - there were no separate ligatures as 'я' and 'ѥ' as in Cyrillic). In OCS canon, forms with je- forms are generally much more frequent than those with just e-. Additional problem would be the fact that we know today that most OCS Cyrillic manuscripts were originally Glagolitic, and were slavishingly copied by monks who sought to preserve the "holy scriptures" in their original form (they even marked yers (ь, ъ) after they were completely lost/vocalized in 11th century), so we can't know whether the initial e- reflects inpreciseness of Glagolitic orthography retained in later Cyrillic manuscripts, genuine non-prothetic prounciation, or j- that was simply not written because it would be superfluous to do so since it was always naturally there when pronounced. Many problems, as one can see, I prefer forms with prothetics, whenever they are present in most branches though --Ivan Štambuk 07:20, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Those examples were quoted from the book. I agree, that vowel "a" (and some others) was not fully affected with prothesion, so the distribution of a-/ja- seems to be optional.

The *črěšnja form seems to me OCS, with a metathesion as in *melko >> OCS mlěko. In Trubačov is mentioned *čerša, *čeršna. In some other sources *čeršn'a. With gǫba I'm not also sure, Derksen says that the meaning "leprosy" is only Serbo-Croatian. It also existed word *gǫba, with meaning "mouth" but with different stress. H.patera 11:06, 27 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Correct for *čeršnja, I misread something. However, I'm worried about PIE *ker- (the same one that gave Proto-Slavic ?) because I've read it's a borrowing from Vulgar Latin *cerasia < old Ancient Greek, which seems plausible. So far I see some other nouns in the lists (like *melko) which were borrowed from other IE branches but have listed IE root, and that seems kind of wrong to me. I was thinking of a some superscript notation for those to distinguish them from those that naturally reflected from PIE.


 * Also correct for the "leprosy" meaning. Derksen says for *gǫba that the same form can be reconstructed for both meanings of 'fungus' and 'lip, face' with the same 'a' accent paradigm" meaning "accent on the root". "mouth" meaning has also been preserved in "Serbo-Croatian" as 'gubica' (/= guba the mushroom), so they should be kept separated. --Ivan Štambuk 11:49, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

I found an interesting thing - etymology of english cherry: ME cheri < Anglo-Fr cherise (taken as pl.) < OFr cerise < VL *ceresia < Gr kerasion, cherry < kerasos, cherry tree < ? IE base *ker-; derived by the ancients from Cerasus, city on the Black Sea: the city's name is itself from the cherries grown in the area.

I know that Croatians don't like to hear the word Serbo-Croatian, but i would like to use it here only as a term for all slavic languages of Jugoslavia except slovenian and macedonian. We had also "the czechoslovak language", before the WWII :-) And czech and slovak are much more different than serbian and croatian. H.patera 13:12, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Maybe it would be nice to divide these words to some smaller groups within this page. For example: trees, bushes, grasses, grains, fruits, vegetables... or something like that. What do you think? H.patera 21:49, 29 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Good idea. Try some division and we'll see how it looks like. --Ivan Štambuk 21:54, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

How does it look like? :-) H.patera 18:40, 30 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Much better :-) --Ivan Štambuk 18:27, 31 March 2008 (UTC)