On Tue, 03 Apr 2001 08:44:26 , "Glen Gordon"
<
glengordon01@...> wrote:
>Miguel:
>>The loss of the vowel also has to do with the Pre-Basque accent and >is
>>therefore equally unclear [...]
>
>What's wrong with an initial stress accent?
No variant of Basque has initial accent. Zuberoan has penultimate
stress accent, some Central dialects have mostly pitch accent on the
second syllable, and most Bizkaian words are unaccented (Hualde
[Towards a History of the Basque Lg, pp.171-188] plausibly explains
this as original final accent). Martinet hypothesized that Basque at
some stage may have had initial accent, but that seems too simplistic.
My guess is that there were several patterns, confused by asymmetric
vowel/sylable deletions (e.g., in compounds, -i and (usually) -u drop,
but -a, -e and -o stay [though merged as -a < *@ ?]).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...