Re: Stress Borrowing?

Eamon Graham scripsit:

> Is it a normal or natural thing for languages to change word stress
> placement due to contact from surrounding languages?  For example,
> let's say language X has penultimate stress and language Y and
> language Z both have ultimate stress.  Would it be usual for
> language X to shift the stress to the ultimate syllable?
In my scarcely-unlimited set of examples, I can think of none that
look like that, unless indeed Germanic "caught" its heavy initial stress
from some unknown substratum language.  Germanic does in some ways look
like a creole of Indo-European....

--
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
        --_The Hobbit_

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