Proto-Germanic with stress on ultimate syllabe?

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Arayik Tonikyan
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Proto-Germanic with stress on ultimate syllabe?

Post by Arayik Tonikyan »

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?
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Creyeditor
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Re: Proto-Germanic with stress on ultimate syllabe?

Post by Creyeditor »

Derivational prefixes would probably be reduced or lost altogether at some point.
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Sequor
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Re: Proto-Germanic with stress on ultimate syllabe?

Post by Sequor »

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?
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.

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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