The relative chronology is clear: after
Verner's Law (which in turn followed Grimm's Law) but before the separation of
the various Germanic subbranches was complete. Verner's Law was conditioned by
the INHERITED location of stress, so it must have preceded the stress shift. On
the other hand, the earliest historically attested Germanic languages already
show the results of the shift (such as the reduced vocalism of unstressed
syllables, and the tendency to suppress non-initial secondary stresses). The
TENDENCY towards initial stress may have begun in Proto-Germanic to be
parallelly developed in the daughter languages. Anyway, the time window is
pretty narrow, though its absolute dating is difficult (from ca. 100 BC to
ca. AD 200).
The name of Helsinki is of Swedish origin.
The city was established in 1550 (by Gustav I Vasa) in the parish of Helsinge,
originally at the local rapids known as Helsingfors; -nk- : -ng- is in this case
Finnish consonant gradation, not Verner's Law. As for Finnish stress, it has
been initial since Proto-Uralic times, as far as I know.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2001 1:37 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] kuningas <-> knyaz
At what time did Germanic acquire its stress on the first
syllable,
and what are the reasons for believing in just that date? There's
another thing that puzzled me, which is Finnish Helsinki nom.,
Helsingin
gen. tec. Helsiki is a Germanic loanword (cf
Helsingør/Helsingborg and the
village Helsinge in Denmark). It looks
like someone did a Verner on it, but
that's not the explanation the
Finno-Ugricists come up with? Did Finnish
have variable stress when
it was borrowed? Did Germanic
then?
Torsten
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