Hi, members!
Last week Mark Odegard expressed an interest
in PIE stress, the way its mobility affected the
development of PIE grammatical paradigms,
and how the stress system of the protolanguage
evolved in the individual daughter languages.
I suppose other CyBaList might find an overview
of these problems interesting.
The subject is so vast that even a cursory
introduction will take some space. I've decided
to divide the material into several short parts
and post them separately.
Part 1 (the attachment) explains the notions
of stress, pitch accent and tone, and provides
an elementary theoretical basis for further
discussion. Part 2 (which should be ready
on Wednesday or thereabouts) will be about the
general character of PIE stress and its role
in PIE declensions and conjugations. Part 3 will
be devoted to the most primitive stage of PIE
stress, which can't be reconstructed with the
help of the comparative method, but is partly
recoverable through internal reconstruction.
The attachment is a document in RTF format.
It would be a good idea to have Microsoft's
Georgia font (version 2.05) and Lucida Sans
Unicode (for phonetic symbols) to see the
text as originally composed. If any interested
CyBaList member should find it difficult to
open or read the attachment, please contact
me at
gpiotr@... (rather than on
CyBaList) to receive the document in some
other format.
Piotr Gasiorowski