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Ivanov A.O. [Phonological akanye in the Satem and early Slavic languages] World of Science. Series: Sociology, Philology, Cultural Studies, 2024, Vol. 15, No. 3. Available at: https://sfk-mn.ru/PDF/10FLSK324.pdf (in Russian).

Phonological akanye in the Satem and early Slavic languages

Ivanov Alexey Olegovich
Saint Petersburg, Russia
E-mail: lesha-ivanov@yandex.ru

Abstract. We are studying the phenomenon of phonological akanye, i.e. the dominance of the phoneme «a» over the phoneme «o» in a number of languages. For ease of comparison, we introduce the algebraic parameter OtAr (O-to-A-ratio) as the frequency of use of these phonemes in different texts. If in the centum Indo-European languages — in Latin and in ancient Greek — these phonemes are found approximately equally, then the texts in the ancient satem languages show a clear prevails of «a». Focusing on the ancient Persian language of the Achaemenids and the chronological increase in the proportion of the phoneme «o» in all written Indo-Iranian languages, we hypothesize that, in retrospect, these languages were also absolutely akateic. We focus on the early Slavic akanje, giving examples of Slavic onomastics and borrowings from Slavic in everyday vocabulary for Greek, Finnish, Albanian, Romanian and Hungarian. We also touch upon the disintegration of the Slavic akanje, the labialization of «a» into «o», and show that the previously proposed mechanisms do not explain most of the known cases. We express our own considerations based on the widespread use of laudatory poetry during the period of Slavic military democracy, on the drift of accentuation and on the prestige of using phonetics with a new «o» instead of the old «a». We briefly touch upon another phonological theory of the formation of «o» in the early Indo-European period — the laryngeal theory of de Saussure-Kurilovich. From our point of view, neither the methods proposed in this theory nor alternative considerations based on vowel harmony can explain Slavic labialization.

Keywords: Indo-Iranian languages; Slavic language; Akanye; borrowings; labialization; laryngeal theory; synharmonism

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