Славянские существительные u-склонения и их акцентуация

Abstract

The Indo-European u-stem nouns merged almost completely with the o-stems in all Slavic languages. In every Slavic language, their combined paradigm shows traces of both original sets of endings. The merger of the two paradigms began before the earliest attestations of Slavic, but the attested evidence allows us to determine that the paradigms must have been distinct in late Common Slavic. The original distribution between u- and o-stems was blurred when they started to merge. The endings were redistributed on the basis of phonological and semantic criteria. In this paper it is argued that a similar process took place in the accentuation of masculine o- and u-stems in Slavic. The accentual phenomena discussed here have alternatively been explained as reflexes of a Proto-Slavic accentual pattern referred to as accent paradigm d.