Re: [tied] kuningas <-> knyaz

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 8173
Date: 2001-07-30

The relative chronology is clear: after Verner's Law (which in turn followed Grimm's Law) but before the separation of the various Germanic subbranches was complete. Verner's Law was conditioned by the INHERITED location of stress, so it must have preceded the stress shift. On the other hand, the earliest historically attested Germanic languages already show the results of the shift (such as the reduced vocalism of unstressed syllables, and the tendency to suppress non-initial secondary stresses). The TENDENCY towards initial stress may have begun in Proto-Germanic to be parallelly developed in the daughter languages. Anyway, the time window is pretty narrow, though its absolute dating is difficult (from ca. 100 BC to ca. AD 200).
 
The name of Helsinki is of Swedish origin. The city was established in 1550 (by Gustav I Vasa) in the parish of Helsinge, originally at the local rapids known as Helsingfors; -nk- : -ng- is in this case Finnish consonant gradation, not Verner's Law. As for Finnish stress, it has been initial since Proto-Uralic times, as far as I know.
 
Piotr
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: tgpedersen@...
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2001 1:37 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] kuningas <-> knyaz

At what time did Germanic acquire its stress on the first syllable,
and what are the reasons for believing in just that date? There's
another thing that puzzled me, which is Finnish Helsinki nom.,
Helsingin gen. tec. Helsiki is a Germanic loanword (cf
Helsingør/Helsingborg and the village Helsinge in Denmark). It looks
like someone did a Verner on it, but that's not the explanation the
Finno-Ugricists come up with? Did Finnish have variable stress when
it was borrowed? Did Germanic then?

Torsten




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