Re: Stress shift

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.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson

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