Slavic liquid metathesis and pleophony

During the Common Slavic period, a tendency, known as the law of open syllables, led to a series of changes that eliminated closed syllables. By the Old Church Slavonic period, every syllable, without exception, ended in a vowel. Such changes included:

• monophthongization of diphthongs,
• loss of word-final consonants (PSl *vьlkъ < PBSl *wilkás < PIE *wĺ̥kʷos),
• simplification of some medial consonant clusters (OCS tonǫti < *topnǫti), and
• formation of the nasal vowels *ǫ < *am/*an and *ę < *em/*en.

The change discussed here is part of this process, and it involved the liquid consonants, grouped under the cover symbol R, *l or *r in a coda position, in environments that are traditionally designated as in the table on the right. The application of the law of open syllables in such environments had different results in different Slavic dialects, and it is some of the earliest evidence for differentiation into the multitude of Slavic languages.

In some, it is the metathesis of a sequence of liquid consonants followed by a vowel, and in others, it is an insertion of another vowel. In most cases, the effect was to eliminate the syllable-final consonants *l and *r so that the law of open syllables was maintained.

If the liquid metathesis is complete only if it occurred with the corresponding vowel lengthening, the metathesis occurred completely in South Slavic and partially in Slovak and in non-word-initial position in the whole Czecho-Slovak area. The complete metathesis has been operational in all Slavic languages for acuted syllables. For word-initial non-acuted syllables, there was no lengthening except in South Slavic and, partially, Slovak.

As mentioned, the complete metathesis occurred in South Slavic, in Czech and Slovak and in Polish and Sorbian, without lengthening. In North-West Lechitic, the metathesis did not occur even for *CarC syllables. In East Slavic, pleophony yielded *CVRC > CVRVC. The reflex of *l in North-West Lechitic and East Slavic is always "hard".

Since the reflexes of acuted word-initial *ar- and *al- are the same in all Slavic dialects, they must have changed before the syllables ending with a liquid, which have different reflexes.[1] One can thus distinguish the first and the second metathesis of liquids.

From Slavic evidence alone, the change cannot be dated precisely because no Slavic languages had yet committed to writing. However, words may have been documented from contemporary non-Slavic languages, and words may also have been borrowed into Slavic from other languages. That makes it possible to narrow down the time that the change occurred.

The liquid metathesis occurred in the Common Slavic era. It took place after or was still productive until the end of the 8th century. The name of Charlemagne, who died in 814, underwent the change:

• Old High German Karl[note 1] > PSl. *karl′u[note 2] > Common Slavic *korl′ь > Russian koról′, Polish król, Slovak kráľ, Serbo-Croatian krȃlj

On the other hand, the change had already been completed in the earliest Old Church Slavonic documents. That implies that the change was completed, at least in the dialects of Bulgaria and of Macedonia, in no later than the 9th century, when the documents were written. There are, however, some attested unmetathised words in OCS such as ал(ъ)дии, a doublet of the metathised ладии.

There are also glosses of Slavic words in foreign-language sources. Earlier sources show no effect of liquid metathesis, such as when the late-8th-century Greek chronicler Theophanes the Confessor writes Slavic names as Ἀρδάγαστος (Ardágastos) and Δαργαμηρός (Dargamērós). Old Church Slavonic versions of the names, with the metathesis applied, would be Radogostъ and Dragoměrъ. Liquid metathesis is also seen in various borrowings preserved in toponymics; Latin Arba > Serbo-Croatian Rȃb, Latin Albōna > Serbo-Croatian Làbīn, Latin Scardōna > Serbo-Croatian Skràdīn etc.

It has been suggested[2] that East Slavic preserved the actual state of affairs, that the vowel was inserted in Common Slavic and that it was only subsequently lost in all dialects except in East Slavic, preceding the liquid. The exact development would thus be in Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian as follows:

• PSl. *bardā 'beard' > *Common Slavic *bar^adā (*bor^oda) > *b^aradā (*b^oroda) SCr. bráda, Blg. bradá.

• Proto-Slavic language

• Kapović, Mate (2008), Uvod u indoeuropsku lingvistiku [Introduction to Indo-European linguistics] (in Croatian), Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, ISBN 978-953-150-847-6
• Matasović, Ranko (2008), Poredbenopovijesna gramatika hrvatskoga jezika [Comparative-Historical Grammar of Croatian] (in Croatian), Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, ISBN 978-953-150-840-7
• Holzer, Georg (2007), Historische Grammatik des Kroatischen. Einleitung und Lautgeschichte der Standardsprache [Historical Grammar of Croatian. Introduction and Phonological History of the Standard Language] (in German), Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, ISBN 978-3-631-56119-5