Talk:Ruki sound law

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There was an error in the article: but the change s > š happened after, not before r, u, K, i. I have fixed it and added some more information.

--Grzegorj 17:18, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

I've cleaned this article up a little, but there are some things I have questions and concerns about;

  • How much do we really know about the precise value of the retracted sound?
  • When we say the sibilant was "probably an apical sibilant", does that mean apico-alveolar? Or apico-postalveolar? (Some people think the Spanish apico-alveolar sounds like ʃ, but there is a difference.)
  • Shouldn't we use either š or ʃ throughout, instead of using both? Which one should we use? Philological tradition I think would warrant the use of š; and if we don't know the precise value of š, shouldn't we use š instead of the IPA?
  • What is meant by "It associates with a Russian word which means 'hands' or 'arms'"?
    • I'm guessing it's referring to the fact that since "ruki" has a meaning in Russian, that fact can be used as a mnemonic to remember after which sounds the change occurred. -- pne (talk) 14:41, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
  • What is meant by "It was later proposed to be valid for all Satem languages, except for Indo-Iranian languages"? Obviously it is also valid for Indo-Iranian; after all, that's where the rule was first observed. Perhaps the writer meant "not just the Indo-Iranian languages"? I'm not changing it, since I'm not sure what was meant.
  • The "Exceptions in Indo-Iranian languages" section does not seem to actually deal with exceptions. It should be renamed. There probably are some exceptions, which could be added.
  • "[T]he two sounds must have been very close (r/l), so that both could have triggered the change in Indo-Iranian" -- I don't see how that's a "drawback" to the theory. Has it been cited as one in other sources?
    • And nobody is requiring [l] to have triggered the change. PII may simply have merged the liquids before ruki occured.
  • "[A]nd what's more, there are no real examples of this change working in Slavic" -- what change is meant? The merger of l and r?
    • s > š after PIE l probably.
  • Finally, I changed all the examples of phonemes/allophones to italics with no marking (e.g. //, []) around them. I'm not sure if they should be treated as phonemes or allophones or some other more vague category. Also, I couldn't figure out how in MediaWiki to put brackets around something that is double-bracketed :)

71.82.214.160 01:34, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

  • And one new issue...
This velar fricative changed back into š before a front vowel or j.
I'd be interested in knoing if there's any proof that the sound ever was [x] in this context - couldn't š → x have been the conditional part? Or was it that the yers were elided in-between, thus giving some modern [x] from s + i...? --Tropylium 08:40, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
Since a number of vowels (I think) became proto-Slavic front vowels before the first regressive palatalization that changed velar consonants to postalveolar ones, there would be variance as to the conditions for the appearance of *š as opposed to *č and *ž. There might also be evidence from loanwords, but I'm not sure. I'm also not sure of the evidence that *š was an intermediate step for Proto-Slavic other than that that's the realization in other language families. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 14:20, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Examples

It would be nice to have some examples of words that changed. -- pne (talk) 14:41, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Here's one example:

PIE *h2ous

  • Proto-Slavic *uxo
Russian: ухо
Polish: ucho
Bulgarian: ухо

And some Centum languages to compare to

Latin: auris
Proto-Germanic: *auson
I'm sure they're relatively easy to find at wiktionary. — Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 18:44, 30 April 2008 (UTC)