On the Change of jat' to E after jot

A still argued, but more often ignored, problem of Russian historical phonology is whether or not the phoneme lei changed to or coalesced with lei after jot at an early date. Many of the historical phonologies and historical grammars of Russian ignore the question completely, others simply state the change as an undisputed fact, and only a minority consider the question in any detail (above all Sobolevskij 1907 and Durnovo 1924). Vlasto (1986:126) simply says, "The sg. fem. gen. ee ~ elf ~ eif," with no source cited, and never considers it in terms of a general sound change. The evidence most commonly cited includes the modern Russian gen. sg. fem. eif, the acc. sg. fem. samoif, and the pronunciation of the adj. pI. as [ij;:J] rather than [ijiJ. which assumes an earlier */ijol rather than lije/. Sobolevskij (1907:65) assumes that ei/ etc. are by analogy to menif (<-mene). whereas Durnovo (1924: 182-83) argues for the change of tel to tel after [j]. Deciding the question is complicated by several factors. First of all, the combination [je] occurred only in a small number of instances. Because the "first jat '" after jot changed to lal (e.g., *stoyetey ~ stojati) and the diphthongs which gave the "second jat'" changed to Iii after ajat (e.g., na stole but na kraUJi from a presumed locative ending *-oy), only the so-called "third jat'" could occur after U]. Second, since this "third jat''' was an East Slavic feature, it would not be expected to occur (except as a "scribal error") in any documents which closely followed the usual rather Bulgarianized orthography of early Old East Slavic documents. Forms with jat' are clearly not rare, but the number of cases in documents of the II th and 12th centuries is very small as a percentage of the total: for a listing of some instances, see Sobolevskij 1907: 152-53. We might well expect to find more examples of the "third jat'" in original East Slavic documents (as opposed to those copied directly or indirectly from South Slavic originals), but since we have a very limited number of extant original East Slavic documents from the II th and 12th centuries, we cannot expect to find a large number of attested occurrences of [je]. Third, there were a limited number of instances in which the combination of UJ + [e] could occur, because the "third jat'" was restricted to a limited number of grammatical categories: the gen. sg. and nom.-acc. pI. offeminineja-stem nouns; the acc. pI. ofmasc. jo-stem nouns; the gen. sg. fem., nom.-acc. pI. fem., and masc. acc. pI. of the definite adjective; and the feminine gen. sg. pronominal forms, such as eif 'her', toe 'that one', samoe 'itself". Given the low number of categories in which we might expect to find the forms that interest us and the fact that most texts of the first two centuries were either direct copies of South Slavic originals or copies of copies. finding decisive evidence is not easy. It is made even more difficult by the fact that all of the instances where [je] might occur are grammatical endings, which are subject to analogical change, and therefore less useful for resolving purely phonological questions. A fourth complicating factor is that any attested forms must be considered within the context of the entire document, not just as isolated forms. It is well known that jat' fell together with lei in some dialects of Russian at a very early date. Sometimes the coalescence was only in unstressed position. in other cases in stressed position as well. In some cases e is used for jat' in words which were South Slavic rather than East Slavic.