Talk:племя

Etymology: Mistakes in current information: Old Church Slavonic is not the proto-language. That is, Russian is not a direct descendant of OCS. Rather, OCS and Russian both descend from Proto-Slavic. It is true that in OCS племя was spelled with a yus, but this is not why the -n- appears in the oblique forms. Instead, in early Proto-Slavic ALL of the forms of this word had this -n-, however in the development of Proto-Slavic the law of open syllables took effect, eliminating all closed syllables somehow. "Somehow" usually meant deleting codas, but some codas left an effect on the preceding vowels; e.g., nasal consonants were deleted, but also nasalized the preceding vowel. This is why you have the yus in the nominative. In the oblique forms, the declension endings all added a vowel after this final -n of the stem, which allowed the -n to be resyllabified with this new syllable, meaning that it was no longer necessary to delete the -n- due to the law of open syllables.

Someone should update the etymology to reflect this information, if such information is necessary to present in the etymology. I'm not convinced it's necessary, but if you're going to do it, do it right.
 * Where do you see proto or unattested on this page? It just says from Old Church Slavonic (not very surprising that). Mglovesfun (talk) 14:04, 11 December 2010 (UTC)