Re: Stress shift

Quoting Dirk Elzinga <Dirk_Elzinga@...>:

> At 3:58 PM +0100 3/3/03, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> >To continue plague the list with more questions about
> naturalness/plausibility,
> >the development of Steienzh as currently envisaged requires that the
> language
> >within a relatively short period (a few centuries at the maximum) moved
> the
> >formerly phonemic stress (which could occur on any stem syllable, as
> well as on
> >certain affixes) to the initial syllable of words, whereupon it started
> pretty
> >drastic reductions of unstressed vowels. Is there any natlang precedent
> for a
> >such change?
>
> You speak a language in which such a change has taken place, and you're
> reading another one which underwent a similar set of changes. The
> Germanic family in general shifted the PIE accent to word- (or stem-)
> initial position, and posttonic vowels have been reducing to varying
> degrees in the daughter languages ever since.
They don't tell you such things in school for some reason.

Good to know in any case; I've been having a vaguely bad conscience about it
ever since that reconstruction game coupla years back, when I got the coment
that the change was "strange".

                                            Andreas