The Fourth Palatalization of Velars in Southwest Ukrainian: The Case of the Kryvorivnja Dialect

ABSTRACT

The paper deals with the fourth palatalization of velars in the Kryvorivnja dialect, one of the southeastern Hutsul dialects of Southwest Ukrainian, in its connection with the tendency toward intrasyllabic harmony constraint introduced in Common Slavic. A new interpretation of the concept of intrasyllabic harmony is offered with respect to the tonality feature of flatness (rounding) for Common Slavic and Southwest Ukrainian: most of the Kryvorivnja consonants are palatalized after unrounded vowels and non-palatalized after rounded vowels. Based on the calculation of sound formants in the Praat program, I argue that the fourth palatalization serves as a requirement for the change of Common Slavic *o in the Kryvorivnja dialect. This is why the dialect largely renders Common Slavic *o as rounded vowel formants after nonsharped consonants and unrounded vowel formants after sharped consonants.

KEYWORDS:

• fourth palatalization of velars
• Southwest Ukrainian
• Kryvorivnja dialect
• intrasyllabic harmony constraint
• Common Slavic
• flatting system
• change of *o to i

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

2 Not a speaker of Kr or Hutsul, I have spent almost every summer in the contiguous Dniester dialect speaking environment since childhood listening to some palatalizations. I am thankful to the informants in Kryvorivnja for their assistance, namely Vasyl′ Charuk (1930), Marija Zelenčuk (1930), Paraska Zelenčuk (1931), Nykolaj Džurak (1932), Vasyl′ Potjak (1933), Vasylyna Semnjen (1933), Marija Džurak (1938), Palahna Zelenčuk (1939), Marija Zelenčuk (1940), Vasylyna Zelenčuk (1943), Vasylyna Maksym′′juk (1953), Marija Potjak (1953), Vladyslav Zelenčuk (2006), and to Ol′ha Rybaruk (1996) and Taras Šmeha (1998) for notes on pronunciation and semantics of some forms. In this paper, I do not use any printed sources in Kr.

3 For a classification of Hutsul, see Janów 1992.

4 In this paper, square brackets refer to IPA symbols; symbol [ɪ] is presented as ÿ, [ʉ] is presented as _oy, [u:] is presented as ū, [e:] is presented as ē, [ɨ] is presented as y, and [ɦ] is presented as h if no brackets are used, and symbol [˙] refers to semi palatalization. Jod is represented in transcription as i̯ with respect to its nonmoraic nature in CS, as shown in Bethin 1993.

The following abbreviations are used throughout the text:

1. For languages/dialects: U – Ukrainian; PU – Proto-Ukrainian; SWU – Southwest Ukrainian; NU – North Ukrainian; MoU – Modern Ukrainian; CS – Common Slavic; LCS – Late Common Slavic; NS – North Slavic; Kr – the Kryvorivnja dialect;

2. For grammatical terms: 4pal – the fourth palatalization of velars; the capital K, [K], and /K/ – any velar; Č – affricates and fricative consonants c, (ʒ), č, (ǯ), š, ž; Ś – fricative consonants ź, ś; nom (nominative), gen (genitive), dat (dative), acc (accusative), inst (instrumental), impr (imperative), sg (singular), pl (plural), f (female), m (male), n (neuter), pst (past tense), pres (present tense), fut (future), inf (infinitive), perf (perfective), impf (imperfective), adj (adjective), shrp (sharp), flt (flat), and grv (grave).

Palatalized consonants are considered sharp along with the front vowels; high tonality relates to sharp vowels and consonants. While a compact sound is characterized by a higher concentration of energy within a phoneme, a grave sound refers to non-front sounds “characterized by the pre-dominance of the lower formant, with a feebleness or a complete lack of higher components in the spectrum” (Jakobson 1962, 473, 429).

5 ESUM 4:108; 2:429; 2:149.

6 Cf. Flier 2018 for NU and SWU.

7 I reinterpret the tendency towards intrasyllabic harmony as a phonological constraint with respect to the Rule-Based phonology and, to some extent, Optimality Theory (see Chomsky and Halle 1968; Prince and Smolensky 2004; Bermúdez-Otero and Trousdale 2012; Bermúdez-Otero 2015; Ramsammy 2015; Vaux and Myler 2018; Honeybone 2019a, 2019b; Salmons 2021).

8 Praat is used for examining the spectrogram of a sound, which is “a spectro-temporal representation of a sound,” and measuring of sound formants (Praat: doing phonetics by computer. Intro 3.1. Viewing a spectrogram: https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Intro_3_1__Viewing_a_spectrogram.html). It helps to identify the sound more accurately and reveal the main tendency that a speech attests.

9 Although with typological reservations, one can mention here the principle of intrasyllabic harmony in Altaic languages, which were syllabic and used back velars before back vowels, not front vowels (Shevelov 1964, 254–256). Jakobson (1971, 187) first applied this feature to CS and suggested that in CS, a tendency to intrasyllabic harmony should be explained by convergence development with Altaic, a thesis which still warrants further discussion (cf. Stachowski 2020).

10 Cf. Shevelov 1979, 51–52; Shevelov 1965, 377–390.

11 Here I rely on the periodization of phonological development of Ukrainian as suggested by Shevelov (1979, 40) which is the following: Proto-Ukrainian (until the mid-11th century), Old Ukrainian (from the mid-11th century through the 14th century), Early Middle Ukrainian (from the 15th century through the mid-16th century), Middle Ukrainian (from the mid-16th century to the early 18th century), Late Middle Ukrainian (the remainder of the 18th century), and Modern Ukrainian (from the very end of the 18th century on).

12 In Table 2, types of vowels are based on Shevelov 1979 (52, 89).

13 A typological parallel in distribution of tonality distinctions and “reductions of two-constituent tonality syntagms” can be drawn to Old and Middle English, though vowels in Old and Middle English would be different, “Greek, Czech, High German dialects, Danish dialects, and elsewhere” (Andersen 1973, 770). The table is based on the Old English and Middle English Table 5 in Andersen 1973 (772).

14 This acoustic description was suggested for [d^jɪ]m by Zoja Dudnyk.

15 It is worth noting that in some cases, [g^j] and [k^j] can correspond to [ɟ] and [c], respectively.

16 This symbol is used here for fricative consonants ź, ś.

17 Regarding the life cycle of phonological processes see Bermúdez-Otero and Trousdale 2012; Bermúdez-Otero 2015.

18 CS origin of this expressive/onomatopoetic word with h would be controversial if assigning spirantization of g to “the late 12th and/or early 13th” century (see Shevelov 1979, 355).

19 In his personal communication of June 26, 2021, Henning Andersen brought my attention to this phenomenon. Similar observations are found in Andersen 1969.

20 I use this symbol as the one which best represents the relevant phoneme.

21 Andersen’s (1969, 560–561) dating of *g as a fricative to the time “well before 1200” is somewhat perplexing since it would shift the 4pal to the time before the jer shift, which looks less plausible within the framework of my theory.