Reconstruction talk:Proto-Slavic/bez(ъ)

The ъ
Under what conditions does this appear? Unlike some other final vowels/consonants, z- can appear at the beginning of pretty much any syllable, so it could easily combine with any following word without changes. 20:10, 7 August 2013 (UTC)
 * ESSJa has seven pages on *bez(ъ), perhaps the answer is somewhere within. Too much Russian for me. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 21:49, 7 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Motivation of ъ in ЭССЯ vol.2 p.9: "Мы указали в заглавии статьи форму *bez(ъ), как бы допуская существование дублета с гласным исходом. Ср. рефлексы в соврем. русск. безо-, сербохорв. беза-, чеш., польск. beze-. Вместе с тем, даже если предположить ранний характер варианта *bezъ, его следует признать относительной инновацией праславянского, при исходном праслав. *bez-." My translation: "We took the form *bez(ъ) for the title of the article admitting possibility of existance of a doublet with a final vowel. Cf. reflexes in modern Rus. bezo-, Serbocroat. beza-, Cz., Pol. beze-. However even if one assumes *bezъ to be an early variant, it still should be considered to be a relative innovation in Proto-Slavic, while *bez- is the original Proto-Slavic form." 31.162.120.115 13:24, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
 * In principle, all Slavic prepositions ending in -z are from athematic forms, so they do not really need -ъ. Of course, there is nothing wrong with adding it. -ъ (or other vocal endings, e.g. -a, -ь) were often added to loanwords ending in a consonant (e.g. < Bulgar Oghuric *sān /rank, honour/) and to other athematic ancient nouns (e.g.  < pIE ). In Church Slavonic, the rule of thumb was to write *bez(ъ) with -ъ when it was used as a preposition (e.g. безъ имене /without a name/), but without it when agglutinated as an affix to a word (e.g. безименьнъ /anonymous/). This was not universally followed, though. I guess it was a matter of taste. Bezimenen (talk) 13:21, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
 * The final a in 🇨🇬 isn't a Slavic inovation but is preserved from 🇨🇬. As for the addition of -ъ in all the loanwords that entered OCS as masculine or were made such, the Baltic languages do exactly the same - they just ad -as/-s respectively. Ентусиастъ (talk) 07:30, 20 June 2021 (UTC)