On Sun, 16 Dec 2001 23:45:45 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<
gpiotr@...> wrote:
>It is counterintuitive only if you assume that pre-Germanic accent was like the strong expiratory stress typically found in the historical Germanic languages. This is unlikely to have been the case, if you reflect that there were no vowel reductions in the millennia between PIE and the sub-historical stages of Proto-Germanic. My guess is that Proto-Germanic already began to develop demarcative (root-initial) expiratory stress while retaining the inherited pre-Germanic "pitch stress" (phonological prominence realised as a high tone). A root-initial voiceless fricative did not undergo Vernerian voicing because it was in the onset of a _stressed_ syllable. What happened word-medially or word-finally was conditioned by the pitch contour rather than expiratory strength: a preceding low tone favoured fricative voicing.
>
>In the unmarked case, tonal and expiratory prominence occur together as cues for primary stress, so the further evolution of the Germanic stress system consisted in aligning _all_ kinds of phonological prominence (including the full range of vowel contrasts) with the root-initial syllable.
Yes, that's it. Except I still want to keep Verner before Grimm-II
(fricativization of the aspirates).
It's the Punjabi thing, but the other way around.
In Punjabi, the inherited "voiced aspirates" /bh/, /dh/, /gh/ are
pronounced voiceless, with low tone on the following vowel (e.g.
<ghor.a:> "horse" is pronounced /kòr.a:/. As demonstrated by
Haudricourt ("Les mutations consonantiques (occlusives) en
indo-européen"), it is the case in general that (voiced) aspiration
(/dh/) is associated with low tone, whilst (voiced) glottalization
(/?d/) is associated with high tone. This is simply because the
vibrations of the vocal chords are lowest for breathy consonants
(/dh/), average for plain voiced (/d/) and highest for
creaky/laryngealized (/d~/). Voiceless consonants [vocal chords too
far apart] and the glottal stop [vocal chords too tight] of course
have no vibration at all.
Now if indeed Proto-Germanic combined a stress accent on the first
syllable with pitch tone in the rest of the word, we would get:
*'ma:tè:r vs. *'paté:r, resulting in:
*'mo:the:r vs. *'phad(h)e:r, where /t(h)/ + high tone > /dh/ or /d/
[breathy to modal voice], and finally:
mo:þar vs. fadar.
For the other positions (word final, third-syllable), we can imagine
that Proto-Germanic perhaps utilized a rising tone to mark word
boundaries (as is the case in e.g. Bambara) [i.e. contours:
*\ma:\te:r/, *\pa/te:r/]
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...