Slavic Yers

Abstract

Yersis the name given to two vowels of Common Slavic (CS) that represent Indo‐European shorti(CS vƅidova = Lat.vidua‘widow’) and shortu(CS d va = Lat.duo‘two’), which is also the value that they had in CS. Textbook descriptions hold that by the end of the CS period, i.e. around the ninth century, ƅ and first became centralized and extra short, before being lost altogether in certain positions. They appear in Old Church Slavonic documents, which have been available since the tenth century, but depending on the geographic origin (and invariably in more recent sources) there is evidence that the scribes no longer had access to their original forms (etymologically inconsistent use; confusion between ƅ and . In modern Slavic languages, yers are represented by different vowels, which typically alternate with zero. This is due to the language‐specific vocalization of yers that has occurred after the dialectal differentiation of CS into individual Slavic languages, which may (e.g. Eastern Slavic, Bulgarian) or may not (most of Western Slavic, Bosno‐Croato‐Serbian) continue to distinguish the original front‐back opposition: in Russian for example,erepresents ƅ, while o derives from (CS dbnb, sbnb >d'en'‘day’,son‘dream’); and both yers have merged in Czech (>den, sen) and Bosno‐Croato‐Serbian (BCS) (>dan, san).

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