Urslavische Grammatik: Einführung in das vergleichende Studium der slavischen Sprachen.Volume II: Konsonantismus by Peeter ArumaaReview by: H. LeemingThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Jul., 1980), pp. 422-424Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4208080 .

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Reviews Arumaa, Peeter. Urslavische Grammatik: Einftihrung in das vergleichende

Studium der slavischen Sprachen. Volume II: Konsonantismus. Carl Winter Universitiitsverlag, Heidelberg, 1976. 199 pp.

THE late Professor Auty concluded a favourable review of the first volume by expressing his warm anticipation of the rest of this grammar of Common Slavonic. He would not have been disappointed by the second volume, for the same qualities which drew his commendation are present here. As his starting point Professor Arumaa takes the Indo-European con- sonantal system presented traditionally as a set of twenty plosives, voiced and unvoiced, aspirated and unaspirated, at each of five points of arti- culation, labial, dental, palatal, velar and labio-velar, with fricatives s and z, nasals m, n, n', U, and the semi-vowels i and u, the two last men- tioned having been dealt with already in Volume One. Eleven sections are devoted to specific problems: the Indo-European dental spirant P, discussed at unusual length for such a chimera, the aspirated consonants, the gutturals, the three Slavonic palatalizations, origins of Slavonic x and z, the fricative j, geminated consonants, final consonants, simpli- fication of consonant groups. These topics are exhaustively reviewed in the light of recent research, with a sure command of the material and fair-minded consideration of conflicting theories.

The main part of the work, constituting about seventy per cent of the whole, is a series of 4I2 sections which give examples of the development in Slavonic of Indo-European consonants and consonant groups. The order adopted is that of the Latin alphabet, with palatal g and k- preceding their velar counterparts, and pc, ch interposed between t and z; since any group of consonants can be easily located in this sequence, the reader does not suffer unduly from the absence of an index, this facility being presumably held over until the last volume. At the end there is a short note on the implications for Slavonic philology of the laryngal doctrine, to which Arumaa seems to adopt an attitude of Thomine doubt or Augus- tinian deferral.

In his discussion of consonants and consonant groups inherited from Indo-European and retained or simplified in Common Slavonic the author displays vast erudition and considerable ingenuity, deploying with confidence and discretion the most diverse materials drawn from the more obscure as well as the better known Indo-European languages. Arumaa's native knowledge of Finnic enables him to bring forward some interesting points, such as the borrowing of the Finnish word for 'goose', hanhi, from Lithuanian *oqsis, as a parallel to the probable, although not universally accepted, borrowing of Slavonic *gQSb from Germanic.

Examples of the various consonant groups are not exclusively Common Slavonic; a few are from Proto-Indo-European: *d+ k in *dku-to, whence CS *sbto. Nor are later forms excluded from consideration. Under headings labelled Indo-European we find neologisms and loan-words from the

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REVIEWS 423

historical period. This is not surprising since several of the more difficult consonant groups only arise as the result of the morphological equivalent of a shotgun marriage, between prefix and root, or root and suffix. Arumaa sometimes directs our attention to the secondary nature of such forms, but assumes, reasonably enough, his reader's knowledge of such facts as the metathesis of liquid diphthongs and the lapse of weak jers. Perhaps a more imaginative use of different type-faces would have made it easier to distinguish original Indo-European from later forms. Such extravagance was presumably out of the question.

There is a certain inconsistency in the use of the later material. On the one hand we find as an example of s +1 +j the adjective os'lj from a Russian Church Slavonic source, with the noun osbl6 quoted alongside; on the other hand, under d + s + k we look in vain for Old Russian and Old Polish cka from *dwska, although the latter is quoted as an OCS form under s + k, with derivation via Germanic from Latin, so that the Hellenes are relieved of responsibility for the invention of this most bothersome word, whose failure to comply with Havllk's law has led some scholars to propose stress as the reason for the vocalization of jer in R doska, Pol deska, etc., rather than 'penseroso' style, or internal analogy. Since the consonant groups in cka and olij both result from the loss of a weak jer there is as strong a case for the inclusion of the former as of the latter.

Arumaa usually leaves the reader to decide whether to accept another scholar's proposals. Thus he presents without comment the relationship between *4ottb 'devil', *xrtb 'hound' and skoryj 'swift' suggested by Schuster- Sewc; silence could be interpreted as acceptance of this Baskervillian association. One etymology rejected by Arumaa is the derivation of *strbjb 'father's brother' from *patr-; while sharing his suspicions, one cannot accept his argument that the intermediate stage between ptr- and str-, namely ttr-, could not have survived long enough to supply the spring-board for the third stage, since more than one articulatory variant could be current at the same time. He accepts the theory that *Zelzo, Lithuanian geleZis and Latvian dzelzs represent various vocalic grades of an Indo-European suffix -eg (h); this was once put forward by Vladimir Georgiev, who now seems to have renounced the idea. The other words advanced as examples of Indo-European suffixal gh, Serbian Church Slavonic slezena 'spleen', *Zelza 'gland' and R selezen', still await a satisfactory explanation.

The reasons for the choice of examples are not always clear. Why introduce Tokharian kdntu and omit Iranian hiziu in a discussion of C.S. *jfzykb? We expect to find Old Church Slavonic (here called 'altbul- garisch'), since the earliest forms recorded are in that language, but what is achieved by citing Russian Church Slavonic forms, unless the citation is accompanied by the date of the document? This procedure is followed by 0. N. Trubacev in his excellent etymological dictionary of the Slavonic languages. We are entitled to feel doubt about the validity of a word such as Russian Church Slavonic vresbn6 which does not appear in the recently published dictionaries of Old Russian and Old Ukrainian. It does occur in Sreznevsky's Materialy and in the nineteenth-century dictionaries of

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424 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Russian Church Slavonic but without attestation or chronology. In view of the weak documentation of the word in South Slavonic we may wonder whether this is not a false Church Slavonicism of West Slavonic proven- ance. In which case nothing would have been lost by quoting the Polish form: wrzesien'.

Some of the explication is telegraphic, if not telepathic, as when the substitution of Z for earlier z suggested by the Lithuanian Zelvd and Greek in Russian Church Slavonic Zely, Serbo-Croat and Czech Zelva 'tortoise' is attributed to the influence of Russian Xeltyj 'yellow'. Obviously the Russian word here stands as representative of Common Slavonic *Zblt- with all subsequent derivations. Would anything have been lost by quoting the Common Slavonic rather than the Russian form? Again the choice of Polish zo1ty beside Lithuanian geltas to illustrate the Indo- European root *ghel-: ghol- could mislead the reader into thinking that the Polish form represents an Indo-European o-grade.

Under the sequence r + s + k Arumaa gives two plant names for 'peach' and 'brassica'. Strictly speaking only the former had this consonant group in Common Slavonic: *bersky (from Lat. persica); in the second r was separated from sk by a vowel: *brosky (from brassica). The Polish name for the peach should be given as brzoskiew (whence modern brzoskwinia) not as here, broskiew, which is a derivative of the second word.

There are a number of misprints which will arouse sympathy rather than confusion - itorii (p. 6) instead of istorii, etc.

Misprints which should be corrected are: JZb (p. 21) to 6z^; chrabbrb (PP. 142, I79) to chrabr6; *neto- (p. II2) to *nekto-; vereernyj (p. 130) to vecernyj; dzes (p. 47) to dzelzs. Misleading transliterations from Russian Church Slavonic are: vxou (p. 32) instead of vxu for Bxoy, and dfgz (p. 36) instead of djagb for .wi. Finally, a more precise formulation would have been desirable of the division of Indo-European into satsm and centum languages, and also of the development in Slavonic of the jotated dental plosives. Presumably these minor flaws will be corrected in a later edition of this most scholarly work. London H. LEEMING

Thomas, George. Middle Low German Loanwords in Russian. Slavistische Beitrage, Band 123. Verlag Otto Sagner, Munich, 1978. 269 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes.

AFTER a survey of past research and a statement of his own aims George Thomas covers the historical background in a well-written discursive preamble. Topics discussed include the rise, development and lapse of Russo-Hanseatic trade, means of transport, items and methods of trade, persons involved, communication between Russian and German, the Livonian Order, cultural contacts. Much of the lexical material is here clearly seen in its situational context. The main part of the work follows the lay-out adopted by Sunray Gardiner in her book on German loan-words in pre-petrine Russian: head-word without definition, followed by citations

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