A history of Slavic accentuation

At the time of the earliest reconstructible dialectal divergences, which belong to the Late Middle Slavic period of my chronology (stages 7.0-8.0 of Kortlandt 1989a, 2003, 2008), the West Slavic languages represented the most conservative part of the Slavic dialects (cf. Kortlandt 1982b: 191 and 2003: 231). They did not share the early simplification of *ś, which had arisen from the second palatalization of *x, to s in South and East Slavic (7.3), e.g. OCS sěrъ ‘gray’, vьsь ‘all’, vьsa, vьsěxъ versus Polish szary, wsz-, Czech šerý, vš-. The Pannonian dialect of the Kiev Leaflets belonged to the South Slavic area at this stage. The West Slavic languages also did not share the palatalization of the clusters *kw, *gw, *xw to cv, (d)zv, sv in South and East Slavic (7.4), e.g. OCS cvětъ ‘flower’, (d)zvězda ‘star’, nom.pl. vlъsvi ‘magicians ’ versus Polish kwiat, gwiazda, Czech květ, hvězda (cf. Vaillant 1950: 56). Moreover, the West Slavic languages did not share th