Re: Stress shift
| From: | Isaac A. Penzev <isaacp@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, March 3, 2003, 20:37 |
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Andreas Johansson scripsit:
> 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? I'm able to invoke rather heavy substratum influences, if that
> helps.
A good example of stress fixation can be seen in West Slavic languages.
Proto-Slavic had tonal phonemic diversisyllabic movable stress. East Slavic
languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian) nowadays keep this phenomenon in
their arsenals, except of tonal feature replace by ordinary dynamic one. West
Slavic languages within 5-7 hundred years acquired fixed phoneticly predicted
dynamic stress: penultimate in Polish, initial in Czech and Slovakian. The two
latter developed vowel length distinction as a kind of compensation. Neither
has heavy reduction in unstressed position, but I don't think it impossible in
other natlangs.
Maybe Jan can enlighten us more. He's a specialist in Polish.
Yitzik
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