The Evolution of sibilants in Polish and Russian

ing away from differences in voicing and manner, Polish has the three sibilant series shown below. Note that we will use ‘postalveolar’ as a general term for alveolopalatals, retroflexes, and also palatoalveolars like [S]. (4) Polish sibilant contrasts Dental/Alveolar Alveolopalatal Retroflex s ̨ ß The Polish alveolopalatals arose historically from a palatalized dental series that once existed in Polish (Stieber 1968, 1962, Rospond 1971), as shown in (5). This occurred in roughly the 13 century. This is a common change for palatalized dentals or alveolars to undergo, and can be seen in Russian dialects, in Irish dialects, and in Japanese (see Padgett 2001 for discussion). (5) Palatalized dentals became alveolopalatals (roughly 13 century) Old Slavic 13 century tJ,dJ,sJ,zJ > t ̨, d ̧, ̨, ̧ i[dJ]e[tJ]e > i[d ̧]e[t ̨]e ‘you go’ Pl. Stieber (1962:63) [s]eja[tJ]i > [ ̨]a[t ̨] ‘to sow’ Carlton (1991: 342) [z]emja > [ ̧]emia ‘soil’ Carlton (1991:345) Our primary interest is in a subsequent sound change. Around the 16 century, a series of palatoalveolars that had existed since the time of Common Slavic underwent an ‘unconditioned’ change to retroflex, as shown below (examples from Rospond, pp. 91, 110 ff.). It should be noted that palatoalveolars in Old Polish and Old Russian occurred only palatalized. This is because they derived from the palatalizing mutation of velars when adjacent to front vocoids, where those velars likely bore secondary palatalization, i.e., kJ, gJ, xJ > tSJ, ZJ, SJ respectively. So the change of interest here involved both depalatalization and retroflexion. (Polish, like Russian, does not permit [i] to follow non-palatalized sounds, hence the change in vowel quality.) (6) Palatalized palatoalveolars became retroflexes (roughly 16 century) [tSji]sto > [t߈]sto ‘clean’ [Sji]ja > [߈]ja ‘neck’ [Zji]to > [!ˆ]to ‘rye’ 4. Russian historical facts The Russian facts are similar in the crucial respects, but show some intriguing differences as well. The consonant inventory is given below. It should be noted that the phonemic status of [ ̨ ̆] and [ ̧ ̆] is often debated, a point to which we will return. 3 The sounds [ ̨] and [ ̧] are usually transcribed with symbols standing for palatalized palatoalveolars, e.g., [SJ ̆] and [ZJ ̆], or (more traditionally) [s&':] and [z&':]. However, we use [SJ] for the Polish allophone of [ß] occurring before front vowels (see section 5). The long Russian sounds in question here are more similar to Polish [ ̨] than they are to Polish [SJ], and for consistency we transcribe accordingly. We think these transcriptions are more accurate than what