--- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2002 12:01 PM
> Subject: [tied] Re: Initial stress
>
>
> > Of course one must conclude from the fact that Russian has free
accent that Proto-Slavic had it too and that therefore Polish at some
time in its history must have shifted to initial stress. But is there
evidence that this development took place when Polish was "in place"
>
> Yes. If it were a "Proto-Lekhitic" change, Polabian and northern
>Kashubian would have been affected to, and they weren't.
Not check and mate yet. I might argue that the areas of those
languages did not have the substrate in question.
>
> > (you've probably guessed what I'm fishing for: a contiguous
initial-stress zone from Pannonia to Scandinavia, based on some
substrate language)?
>
> There are some universal preferences as regards the location of
stress. If a language has a stress rule that ignores syllable weight
and if the location of stress is not determined lexically, then
stress is almost always either word-(or phrase-)initial or
penultimate (more rarely final, as in French), and there are good
reasons why it should be so. You'll find this tendency everywhere,
including Australia and the New World. In other words, the chances
that a given language will have initial stress (wherever it's spoken
and whatever family it belongs to) are pretty high to begin with. In
quantity-sensitive systems primary stress is also frequently initial
(so that syllable weight only determines the location of subsidiary
stresses); otherwise it's often "Latinate" (final/penult or
penult/antepenult, depending on the configuration of syllable weight).
>
Ah, you're arguing coincidence. But then the laws of statistics would
apply and how could we then get such a large contiguous area?
BTW it seems to me that the music of both the Czechs and Hungarians
have examples of "inverted" dotted rhythm, eg one-eighth:three-
eighths, boring old "Germanic music" only has eg three-eighths:one-
eighth rhythms. I would believe music to be more durable than stress
in the language, since you'd have to give up the former if you change
the latter (I think; I'm probably out of my depth here).
> Piotr
Torsten