Earlier I was wondering about the 'e' in Czech/Polish instrumental sg., e.g. hradem, mistakenly thinking it was an effect of the originally palatalized vowel seen in OCS градомь. But the Czech section of The Slavic Languages says that this form, like the dat. & loc. sg., is also a loan from the u-stems. & then I remembered that the regular reflex of PS -ъ is 'e' in Czech/Polish, as in OCS сънъ, R сон, but Czech sen. So I guess the mystery is solved.
Ah, maybe I don't understand everything, but if I understand what u-stems was, "hrad" in modern Czech behaves completely as an u-stem I would say, it has -u genitive for start... but I suppose that this exact word was an o-stem? I'm little confused about Slavic u-stems, but
hrad here is a distinct declension from
pán which for us is the paradigm for the o-stems (I think).
I also have to ask,
Godmy, about a statement made in
Czech Through Russian, that in 'colloquial Czech' essentially every word beginning in 'o' may rather be pronounced 'vo-' depending on the register of speech warranted by the occasion,
I would say, or at least in "normal colloquial Czech" (without any special dialectal influence) that the chance that the "v-" creeps in is 10-20-30%. I think I rarely use it and people around me too. It's possible, but not that much used. Basically, it's still no problem for the Czech phonology to operate comfortably with o-initial words.
For example, this one would be a variant I would never use, it would sound funny to me, it would sound as though I wanted to imitate some peasant perhaps... and I'm not sure the peasant would say it
It just sounds ... like a colloquial variant one would use after drinking many beers, it's weird and I wouldn't say proliferated. But it's possible. But even in the colloquial registers it's somehow a "sub-language"... something too careless even for a colloquial language.
My thinking is that Czech has expanded considerably on what may have been an early Proto-(Balto-)Slavic habit of pronouncing this vowel diphthongally (as in wo-),
Ah, that's quite interesting! A diphthong originally...
...so that the reflexes vary depending on the more popular form within the isogloss, e.g. R восемь, Polabian visem, but Slovak osem, (standard) Czech osm.
I see. Thanks for those examples, I didn't know about those other Slavic forms... but now, when I think of it, I once noticed that the Ukrainian "on" (Czech) is "vin"
Here "von" would be quite acceptable colloquial or sub-colloquial variant for "on" (a little bit more acceptable than "vosm") and I remember that intriguided me
 Tongue.gif "(1) Tongue out :p")
