Re: CHAT: barbarisms

> Date:         Wed, 16 May 2001 15:30:36 -0600
> From: dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
>
> On Wed, 16 May 2001, BP Jonsson wrote:
>
> > At 20:20 2001-05-15 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> >
> > >My point was that Greek words borrowed into English are stressed according
> > >to Henninian principles, and that this had something to do with the
> > >dominance of Henninian pronunciation.
> >
> > Hardly.  Greek loans in Swedish are also stressed according to Latin rules,
> > in spite of Latin accentuation thankfully never having been applied to
> > Greek here.
>
> This says to me that Swedish has a Latin-like stress system
> which all borrowings are subject to. I suspect the same to be
> true of the other Germanic languages, hence the Latin-like
> stress patterns of English.
Danish has a basic initial stress pattern, with exceptions for any
borrowed words where pedants managed to make their idea of proper
pronunciation stick.

For Latin and Greek nouns, Danish tried to mimic the moving accent in
consonant stems: "motor, mo"toren, mo"torer, mo"torerne. But the
definite forms got leveled to the indefinite ones before my time,
unless you're trying to be fancy (so people will say "motoren, but
mo"torer).

For French words, it's 'last syllable pronounced in French'.
Guillo"tine, ge"le. However, any French silent -e came to be
pronounced in Danish (as schwa), which leads to lengthening of the
preceding (stressed) syllable.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)

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