On 2007-01-23 19:39, mandicdavid wrote:
> The point is, however, that the UNSTRESSED yers (and not all of them)
> became 'reduced' and eventually disappeared. Now, the question is why
> did the stress shift from word-final yers to the preceding syllable
> and not from, say, e or o?
Stress, as Miguel has already pointed out, was not a decisive factor.
Jers were positionally strong and weak rather than stressed vs. unstressed.
Other things being equal, high vowels are less prominent than mid and
low in terms of intensity and duration. It's a cross-linguistic
tendency; note e.g. the reduction of short i, u and y to ë (a kind of
schwa) in Kashubian, the failure of the high vowels to undergo
open-syllable lengthening in most accents of Middle English, etc.
Conversely, weak vowels are often raised (as in Latin: *kékanai > cecini:).
Piotr