Re: [tied] Re: Initial stress

----- Original Message -----

From: tgpedersen

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, August 26, 2002 1:33 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: Initial stress

> Yup, tough customers, those Celts. BTW, where did the pattern spread
from, and what was the pattern of stress before?

 

It was originally (perhaps until about 1200) free, as in Russian (and as in the conservative northern dialects of Kashubian), then initial as still in Czech (and as in southern Kashubian plus some dialects of southern Poland). The evolution from initial to penult stress was along a rather familiar path: initial stress is often accompanied by a rhythmically alternating pattern of secondary stresses like this: Swsw, Swwsw, Swswsw (where s = strong, w = weak, S = primary), and since one of the functions of stress is to mark edges of words or phrases (e.g. clitic groups), the last secondary stress tends to be stronger than others. Gradually, it came to be perceived as primary in Polish, so that the above patterns became swSw, swwSw, swswSw (this is what we have in standard Modern Polish). No shift was needed in disyllabic words, of course, and in trisyllabic ones the conflict between Sww and wSw was resolved in favour of the latter.

 

Piotr