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Draft:The Transition of "e" to "o" in Old East Slavic

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The transition from "e" to "o" in Old East Slavic occured between a palatalized consonant and a non-palatalized consonant, and resulted in the introduction of the letter ё to the Russian alphabet in the 18th century to represent an iotated "o" [jo] (which had developed from an iotated "e" [je] by this process). As this transition had happened neither in the West Slavic nor in the South Slavic subgroups, it is evidenced by cognates between languages from those subgroups and from the East Slavic subgroup.[1] (eg. Proto-Slavic *nebo descends to Russian нёбо [njobo] but Old Church Slavonic небо [nebo] and Polish niebo)[2][3]

When considering the implications of this transition in Russian, it is important to note that modern Russian "e" descends from three different vowels in Old East Slavic: [е], [ь], and [ѣ] (note that the latter two must not be confused with [ъ]). This transition affected only [е] and [ь], hence words such as лес and нет, descended from OES лѣсъ and OES нѣту, respectively, retained an [e] between a palatalized and non-palatalized consonant.[1]

Though this is generally considered an Old East Slavic phenomenon, it did not occur simultaneously across all dialects of OES (and in fact, it has not ocurred at all in certain dialects, such as in the dialects of the modern Ryazan Oblast).[1]

References

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  1. ^ a b c Ivanov, Valerij Vasilʹevič (1990). Istoričeskaja grammatika russkogo jazyka (Izd. 3., pererabot. i dop ed.). Moskva: Izdat. Prosveščenie. ISBN 978-5-09-000910-2.
  2. ^ Derksen, Rick (2008). Etymological dictionary of the Slavic inherited lexicon. Leiden Indo-European etymological dictionary series. Leiden ; Boston: Brill. pp. 347–348. ISBN 978-90-04-15504-6. OCLC 179104910.
  3. ^ T︠S︡eĭtlin, R. M.; Večerka, Radoslav; Bláhová, Emilie; Akademie věd České republiky; Institut slavi︠a︡novedenii︠a︡ i balkanistiki (Rossiĭskai︠a︡ akademii︠a︡ nauk), eds. (1994). Staroslavi︠a︡nskiĭ slovarʹ (po rukopisi︠a︡m X-XI vekov) [Old Church Slavonic Dictionary (based on 10th-11th century manuscripts)] (in ruschuczegre). Moscow. p. 359. ISBN 978-5-200-01113-1.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)