Re: Quantity shift (was: Re: Native grammatical terms)

>>>FWIW the Zagreb dialect of Croatian has apparently
>>>lost all distinctions of vowel length and tone
>>>quite traceless in all contexts.  People just
>>>stopped to make the distinctions, or rather the
>>>younger speakers failed to acquire them.
>>
>>This is good news.  It would mean that I could simply drop the long vowels
>>at the appropriate stage of the language's development and not have to
>>apologize for it
>
>Exactly. :)
<big smile> Then that is exactly what I will do.  This makes things a *lot*
easier.

The long vowels will be lost in two stages, then.  The first stage involves
only word-final vowels.  Word-finally V: --> V while V --> 0.  (This
process is what I need the long vowels for in the first place, since it
will allow labialized consonants on the ends of words while still allowing
words to end in a vowel.)  Then, at some time afterward, V: --> V.  This
loss of distinction in vowel length will completely reorganize the stress
in the language, since stress is completely predictable and based on
syllable weight.  If the long vowels go away, you lose a lot of the heavy
syllables.

Which gives me an idea for making a related language.  I could have this
language also lose the vowel length distinction, while remembering where
the stress used to fall before the vowel length distinction was lost.  Thus
this language would move from having fixed stress to free stress.  (Or
something like free stress.  There would be a *lot* of words in the
language with unpredictable stress, but there would also be the underlying
pattern of penultimate stress shifting to the rightmost heavy syllable, and
a lot of those heavy syllables would still be identifiable because they are
made heavy by consonants rather than by the (now vanished) long vowels.)

Isidora

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