Re: Stress shift

> >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.
Other languages are known to have similar processes. Polish switched from
the arbitrariliy-stressed Old Church Slavic to its penult stress, and it
did it very quickly: 3 or 4 centuries max, I believe. Latin went through
an initial-stress phase before arriving at the classical variable-stress
system.

So yes, stress system changes aren't difficult to come by.

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"

Replies