Re: Meillet's law

> > The question is - is the rise of enclinomena the result of the loss
> > of acute mobile type, or the converse?
> > According to what I've written above, it's clear that the
> > elimination of the pitch/tonal opposition in ap.c somehow incited
> > the subsequent loss of phonemic accent in the barytone forms.
>
> I don't know: post hoc does not always mean propter hoc.

Searching the internet for all these interesting laws I came across an
article dealing with early Serbian manuscripts (which were first under
Greek influence, later German/Latin, then Greek again). It turned that
under German/Latin influence texts were divided into words, but under
Greek influence they were divided into larger units.

Is it possible to see the rise of enclinomena as a new tendency to
break up a sentence into fewer and bigger pieces, instead of word-size
ones?

BTW Czech which has initial stress, stresses the preposition in
prepositional phrases. Does that phenomenon belong here?


Torsten