On Tue, Dec 30, 2003, at 03:24 PM, Mate wrote:
> He did compare it because he thinks that if Romanians change the accent
> place in Hungarian loanwords the Russians would do the same.
But a comparison only within the frame of *it might
have been* such and such. By no means in the sense
of "it was so". He wrote namely: <<and the same could
very well [be] done by Slavs too>>. (Noteworthy: he
wrote "Slavs," not Russians.)
> This is not true because Slavic acc. system and Romanian are not the
> same.
This insistence to reiterate this might tempt a
superficial visitor to conclude that in your opinion
Slavic acc system is the same as the Hungarian one.
(Well, my previous question pertaining to Serbo-Croatian,
Slovak and Czech in this respect was exactly based
on a subjective impression that these idioms tend to
emphasize the 1st syllable as Hungarians do. :-)
> Romanian has to, as you said because the sufix -un has to be accented.
Neither Romanian has to. It's a mere custom, it's no
must. For example, the name of a province (in the
South), <Muscel>, is to virtually any outsider Romanian
<Muscél>. To my own amazement, to Muscelean natives
it has to be stressed this way <Múscel> [mus-tSel].
As usual, in a word with an ending which is or seems
to be the diminutival -el (< Lat. -ell-us/a/um),
the accent must fall on this suffix. Hence Romanian
Cornél and Cornéliu whereas Hungarian Kornél with
the stress on the 1st syllable (the accent on "e"
is only to show that this vowel is long and the
mouth barely opened: [e:]).
> In Slavic, it doesn't have to.
Well, although I don't speak Russian, nor Serbo-
Croatian, according to my... earphones, the former
seems to me to have much more variety in stresses
than the latter. :-)
George