LINGUIST List 13.1037

Mon Apr 15 2002

Diss: Historical Ling: Richards "Common Slavic's..."

Editor for this issue: Karolina Owczarzak <karolinalinguistlist.org>

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1. BA364, Historical Ling: Richards "Common Slavic's Pannonian Dialect..."

Dissertation Abstract

Institution: University of California at Los Angeles
Program: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2001

Author: Ronald Richards 

Dissertation Title: 
Common Slavic's Pannonian Dialect as Viewed through Old Hungarian

Linguistic Field: Historical Linguistics 

Subject Language: Old Hungarian

Dissertation Director: Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov


Dissertation Abstract: 

The dissertation focuses on Pannonian Slavic, a dialect of the Common
Slavic protolanguage which existed in what is today Hungary and which
is believed to have died out in the century or so following the
conquest by Magyar tribes of the Carpathian Basin in general, and of
Transdanubia in particular, i.e. the area known in Roman times as
Pannonia. Many Pannonian Slavic loanwords found their way into Old
Hungarian, which in effect became the sole repository for Pannonian
Slavic lexemes. 

We examine here the main theories concerning the ethnolinguistic
make-up of Slavic Pannonia and the methodologies proposed for
identifying Pannonian Slavic loanwords in Hungarian, paying special
attention to the diachronic development of the Hungarian phonological
system and the effects such development would have on the
aforementioned Pannonian Slavic loanwords. 

We then analyze this reconstructed corpus of Pannonian Slavic
loanwords with an eye towards various theories which deal with the
ethnolinguistic profile of Slavic Pannonia. Specifically, we explore
the extent to which Pannonian Slavic can or cannot be associated with
any single Common Slavic dialect (e.g. Proto-Slovene, Proto-Czech) or
dialect group. 

Our results suggest that, if Pannonian Slavic was linguistically
homogeneous, then it is most likely that this dialect was associated
with, or an extension of, the Proto-Serbocroatian (i.e. the Common
Slavic dialect which developed into Chakavian and Shtokavian), while
if it was heterogeneous, then it is most likely that this dialect was
associated with, or an extension of, Proto-Serbocroatian and
Proto-Czechoslovak, although association with the Proto-Sorbian or
Proto-East Slavic dialect groups would remain within the realm of
possibility. Our results do offer strong evidence against the
proposition that Pannonian Slavic was associated with, or as an
extension of, Proto-Slovene. Likewise, while our results cannot shed
light on the question of the Urheimat of the Slavs or the exact nature
of the relationship which obtained between Slav and Avar in Pannonia,
they do show evidence of center-periphery phenomena which would be
consistent with a Pannonia-centered linguistic expansion (be it
primary or secondary) of Slavic.