Hello guys
How do you think Proto Germanic would develop had it developed a strong stress on the ultimate syllabe not on initial one quite early in it's history (300-200 BC)? We would have [kuniŋɡ'ɑz], [hɑr'jɑz] and [kʷe'nɔ̃ː]?
The initial stress led to consonant clusters at the end of words. Would there be similar clusters at the beginning? Would inflectional morphology be better preserved?
First the vowels ok n the initial syllabe may weaken so [hər'jɑz]. What then?
Proto-Germanic with stress on ultimate syllabe?
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Re: Proto-Germanic with stress on ultimate syllabe?
Derivational prefixes would probably be reduced or lost altogether at some point.
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Re: Proto-Germanic with stress on ultimate syllabe?
I'd say that first it's a bit unlikely that Proto-Germanic would have consistent word-final strong stress, because most of those endings were inflectional. But then again, there's real-life Inuktitut, which is exactly like this, with word-final stress (maybe not so strong) even though the most basic inflectional endings (plurality + case in nouns, subject agreement + mood in verbs) go at the end.Arayik Tonikyan wrote: ↑25 Jan 2021 19:45How do you think Proto Germanic would develop had it developed a strong stress on the ultimate syllabe not on initial one quite early in it's history (300-200 BC)? We would have [kuniŋɡ'ɑz], [hɑr'jɑz] and [kʷe'nɔ̃ː]?
The initial stress led to consonant clusters at the end of words. Would there be similar clusters at the beginning? Would inflectional morphology be better preserved?
Yes, I think it'd lead to inflectional morphology being better preserved for longer. Until the daughter languages start moving the stress further back anyway, who knows.
Further down, I suspect a word-final phoneme or two would be eventually lost, along with syncope and other reductions in earlier parts of a word, and that the inflectional endings might end up being reinterpreted as derivational, or just part of the root. To use your example, maybe *hɑrjɑz splits into a doublet of nouns, ɔirɔ́ 'army' plural ɔirɔ́z (from accusative *hɑrjɑ̃ː plural *hɑrjɑnz) and ɔirú:i 'army camp, a group of army tents' as a mass noun (from nominative plural *hɑrjɔːs), assuming a loss of case distinctions in nouns.
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