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Heidelberg, den 30.09.2014
Evaluation of the Habilitation by Zbyněk Holub at Brno University (Czech Republic) "Jazykové doklady prehistorické podunajské migrace slovanského etnika na český jih"' (Brno 2013,297 p.)
The Slavic migrations of the sixth and seventh centuries AD, which brought the Slavs to their contemporary territories, continue to raise questions of reconstruction and the exact date. The investigation by Zbyněk Holub occupies a special place in this research tradition by surveying in a hitherto unprecedented way the full array of archaeological and dialectal data. They enable the author to draw clear conclusions about the migration processes of the 6th and 7lh centuries, which affected the Czech lands. Of particular importance is the reconstruction of the so-called second migration wave, which reached the south-western and south-eastern areas from the south, after passing the Danube valley. The presented data show convincingly, that this migration wave did not come from the north, as previously assumed, but rather along the migration path (attested by the onomastics, next to increasing habitation density in the south during the relevant period) which can explain the continuity of the Slavic population across Pannonia preceding the Hungarian migration of the 9th century. Indeed, the author refers to recent studies of Slovene dialectology (particularly Prank's (2009) study of the Ziljsko Caryn-thian dialect of Slovene). In addition, he describes the paroxytonic prosodic phenomena of the south-western and southern (Doudlebský) Czech dialects, discussing them in the context of the previous literature, which assumed archaicity of these phenomena in the south-west. Again, based on a thorough dialect investigation and a text corpus containing the relevant examples, he is able to describe these phenomena in the Doudleby region with a precision not offered before. In an article written together with
UNIVERSITÄT HE1DELBI R(.
SLAV1SCHES INSTITUT
Professor Dr. Jadranka Gvozdanovic Lehrstuhl für Sprachwissenschaft
the American Slavicist and specialist on Slovene, Marc L. Greenberg, these paroxy-tonic accent phenomena are placed in a Slavic comparative perspective and a tentative historical analysis is proposed.
The presented data have enriched Slavic historical linguistics enormously by providing a solid empirical basis for further research. This is a clear strength of the presented work. The analysis is also thorough, but sometimes remains of a limited scope. For example, the etymology of Dudleb/Doudleb is given as follows:
The origin of the name Dudleb can be deduced (according to the view of most linguists) from:
a) the West German apelativa *theudo (germ. *peutfa-[ nation, tribe, territory) and older germ. *laihaz (got. * laifs; inherited territory, land)
or
b) from the compound Slavic basis *duda (fife, flute, whistle) or *dud- (hoopoe) and lost Slavic base *liab- (from a hypothetical *lebi>, from the original *laib-; „thin"); thus: „thin man, thin as a pipe, flute, whistle" or „as hoopoe").
Unfortunately, the author does not review or question such proposals critically. By the distributional evidence across all of Celtic with numerous Gaulish, Celt-Iberian, and Insular Celtic onomastic evidence (e.g. Gaulish Ambi-toutus, Con-toutos etc, Botorrita 4 toutam (acc.sg.), Old Irish tuath 'tribe, people'), Venetic teuto 'people', Germanic (e.g. Gothic fiiuda 'people, nation'), Umbrian tota, Oscan touto 'city', II-lyrian Teutana, Persona tode 'mass, people', this must have been an Indo-European root of the type *teuta 'people, tribe'. The Celtic evidence is highly relevant, because it is Celtic which for this name exhibits the *eu > ou> o transition, as attested in Gaulish overtime (cf. Delamarre (2003: 295). Moreover, Hungarian tot was (since the 9th century) used for the neighboring Slavs which inhabited former Celtic areas. The other central contribution of the present work is the evidence on paroxitonal intonation (L.H) which is found predominantly, but not exclusively, in bisyllabic words originally characterized by the old initial acute accent (which was later lengthened, at least in open syllables). Also this phenomenon can be understood better if considered in the context of the continuity of the Slavic inhabitation across Pannonia before the Hungarian (im)migration in the 9,h century. Here we should remember that already Ramovs in his survey of the Slovene dialects (1935: 3) stated that in all Carynthian dialects, the lengthening of the old acute must have been later than in the other Slovene dialects because e.g. the lengthened acute *e did not develop the same reflex as
the old long *ě. Ramovš also described the phenomenon of the paroxytonal intonation (1935: 8) in these dialects such that in bisyllabic words with an old acute such as bába 'old woman', (or the neo-acute such as) súša 'dryness', the first syllable is stronger and the second has a higher tone; for trisyllabic words, Ramovš described it as primary accent on the first syllable and a kind of secondary accent on the final syllable. This dialectological description of the Slovene dialects which were historically contiguous to south-western Czech underlines the correctness of Holub's empirical data, and their value for further investigation. Namely, the lengthening of the old acute in all likelihood spread across Pannonia and reached the Czech lands later (where it was sensitive to the syllable rhyme and allowed for exceptions depending on the type of consonant, as discussed by Timberlake 1983, cf. also Gvozdanovic 2013), not reaching Slovak (where only the later neo-acute was lengthened). It is this relative chronology, which now finds a solid empirical basis in Holub's investigation.
The presented study is highly valuable for Slavic historical linguistics and 1 recommend the Masaryk University in Brno to accept it as a habilitation.
V
Prof. Dr. Jadranka Gvozdanovic Chair of Slavic Linguistics Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
References
Delamarre, Xavier (2003) Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise. Paris: Editions Errance. Gvozdanovic, Jadranka (2013) "Compensatory lengthening of Late Common Slavic revisited", in: Irina Kor Chahine & Charles Zaremba (eds.), Travaux de Slavistique, 35-48. Presses Universitaires de Provence.
Holub, Z. & M.L. Greenberg (2013) "A Circum-Pannonian word-prosodic parallel: Paroxytonic accent in the south-west Bohemioan dialect", Jezikoslovni zapiski 19, 11-26. Ramovs, Fran (1935) Historicna gramatika slovenskega jezika VII: Dialekti. Ljubljana: Uciteljska tiskarna.
Timberlake, Alan (1983) "Compensatory lengthening in Slavic: Conditions and dialect geography", in: Markov, V. & D.S. Worth (eds.) From Los Angeles to Kiev, 207-235. Columbus: Slavica.