All I can say is that it was probably a
"central" innovation, since southern Malopolska and the Polish-Kashubian
transitional dialects retained the initial stress until rather late. In
fact, the traditional dialects of Malopolska (southern Poland) from the Tatra
Mountains to just south of Kraków still have it (sociolinguistically, it's a
salient part of the stereotyped highlander accent). It can't be plausibly
explained as Slovak influence, since most of the neighbouring Slovak
dialects (unlike standard Slovak) have penult stress.
In northwestern Moravia and parts of
Silesia (both on the Czech side and in Poland) you will find areas of both
initial and and penult stress, here most likely due to the diffusion of
mainstream prosodic patterns between Polish and Czech.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, August 26, 2002 2:12 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Initial stress
There are a few similar examples in Danish: fórudsætning >
foruds´ætning "precondition" (especially helpful in definite pl.:
foruds´ætningerne), the anecdote of that pronunciation is that it came from the
speech of politicians from Jutland. Did penultimate stress originate in any
particular part of Poland?