Re: 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
>
>
--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> 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.
If the the last part of that sentence refers to the difference
between the -ig of High German and -ing of the other Germanic
dialects, don't forget that the Northern part of the German expansion
east was colonized by Flemings ("koning" tec). Prussia, on the other
hand, was colonized by High German speakers (or it would
be "Koningsberg"?). Therefore "after separation" would be possible.
BTW what is the -k- doing in Dutch "koninklijk"? Verner?

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).
Gothic has no Verner alternation. Theoretically, at least, it could
have had stress shift first and Grimm later.


>
> 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

And how old is the name Helsinge (obviously Germanic) then? I know
that the Finno-Ugricists call it consonant gradation, but has anyone
ever tried to explain it as derived from a Verner-type law operating
on a stress-shifting language? The non-Baltic Fennic languages do not
have initial stress AFAIK (or is it some of the Ugric ones?).

Torsten