I am working on some homework, and struggling. Please don't simply give me the answer, but explain how I could figure it out. I need to be able to do this in the future. The question is: In contemporary Russian, the aspectual partners snjat’ and snimat’ display an alternation between [a] (я) and [im]. This is the result of a sound change in Common Slavic. What happened? I can't seem to make sense of it. I cannot see a similar change in the literature I have and the lectures. Thanks, Bjørg
I'm sorry, but I'm not sure there's anyone on this website who could answer your question. I'm the moderator of the Linguistics subforum, and even I don't have a university degree in the subject. Like most anglophones I have some knowledge of the Germanic languages because English is one of them, and some knowledge of the Romance languages because Latin and French have taken their turns as the major languages of European scholarship and because today we (at least in America) have considerable exposure to Spanish. But my familiarity with the Balto-Slavic languages is slight. I can pronounce Czech rather well because it was my mother's language and I can pronounce Russian decently because I studied it in college. But my vocabulary is pitifully small, I don't know or even understand most of the grammatical paradigms, and I'm as mystified as you are by the phonetic transitions from Old Slavonic into the modern Slavic tongues. And if you think I'm useless for the Balto-Slavic group, I'm even worse with the other groups or singletons: Celtic, Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Albanian, etc. But I do know that the Na-Dene languages of North America (Navajo, Tlingit, etc.) are now believed to be related to the Yeniseian language of Siberia. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! If you find a good source, please let us know! Regards, F.R.
