Grimm sounds in Slavic languages

The song for this post is God is a Serb.

In Ukrainian and Russian, the word for freedom, свобода, would be rendered in Latin as svoboda - which is not how the South Slavic languages render the word. Y’all might remember a certain Slobodan Milosevic if you’re into war crimes at all. His first name contains the Serbo-Croat/South Slav rendering of svoboda - sloboda. His last name is a patronymic - his father’s name has the root for love/compassion - miloš. Hah. Imagine a war criminal named Freedom Compassionson, really would put a dent in the idea that your name decides your fate.

How did the v in svoboda become an l in sloboda? Part of it is explained by the variety of L sounds in Slavic languages. In addition to the l sound common in English, there’s a palatized L. One gains the power to make the sound after eating a plate of dill at the age of 14. I kid, it is made while smushing one’s tongue against the roof of the mouth, the palate. In Cyrillic scripts this is represented with what looks like a little b - as in ya bil’ (я біль). The ль is rendered with an apostrophe in Latin scripts: l’ (palatized). Palatization of the Ls makes them pretty close in sound and anatomy to the vocalized v/w sounds. Naturally, over time, the fuzziness of human pronunciations and shifting standards and dialects meant that some Slavic speakers broke the symmetry in the direction of a hard L and others in the direction of the hard V.

In nearly every Slavic language there seems to be some dialect which turns l’s into v’s and vice versa - at least until homogenization and language standardization showed up. Polish rural dialects used to say mawi for mali (small) in the late 16th century. We know this probably from some nobleman who was hurt someone insulted the size of his wings. In other areas of the world v’s might turn into b’s, as in the example of Bengali or Odia in India, Viswa -> Biswa. Even between Spanish abogada and English advocate this type of bifurcation is visible. The human mouth is a common physical touchstone between humans everywhere. The mechanism by which we combine its physical actions to create different discernible clusters of frequencies seems like nothing short of magic. We are truly God’s creatures the way we mash our quivering flesh pouches against each other to produce masterpieces.

This is sort of a neighbor of Grimm’s law, which details the phonetic musical chairs that Germanic languages tend to play when viewed over an extended period of time with respect to the greater Indo-European family of languages. There are also some interesting vowel sound changes between the Slavic languages - Ukrainian says tilki (тільки, only) while Russian says tolko (только), same for skilki (скільки, how many) and skolko (сколько) - that might reflect a similar sort of phonotactics-shifting-altogether but I leave that as an exercise to the reader (I have become one of those people who passes on the trauma handed to me by math textbooks over the years).