The Enigma of the Polish form król

The Enigma of the Polish form król and Jakobson’s Explanation of Slavic *tort forms

Discusses the problematic issue of length reflexes in the o vowel of Polish *tort forms. Jakobson had assumed that the vowel o was a generalization of shortness, but this cannot explain the form król. Andersen’s theory of the relative chronology of short a > o is presented, along with a new proposal for a variable treatment of long o either as a single segment or a sequence of two shorts, accounting for the different *tort reflexes in Lekhitic-Sorbian and East Slavic.