Posted by Luca Mangiat on 3:34 8/2/01
In reply to: (none)
Hi, Mark!
It's quite a lot I don't post on the message (I posted once or twice in the very old times, about a year ago). I've always been interested in Almea, though.
I was wondering: how did it happen that Cadhinor _raedhan_ (dat. of_raedhos_, supposedly stressed on the first syllable) became _redhán_ in Verdurian, while _aestan_ became _estan_? Was it already stressed in Cadhinor?
You wrote in the Cadhinor Grammar (from Languages of Almea):
<<In general the accent falls on the second-to-last vowel or diphthong: agélla, melástes, thimélis, etáldas, enkhátrie, sáduas, aladéia. However, if the last two syllables have the pattern CVCV(s), the tendency is to accent the antepenult: lérete, Cádhinas, vádhora, rúgites, lábanis.>>
You do not speak, anyway, about final stress.
Thank you in advance for your reply,
Luca
The best I can come up with is that it's an analogical change, allowing all the inflections in the singular to be stressed. (The only other one in that declension is the genitive -ei.)
On the metalinguistic level, I had that accented dative long before I'd worked out the Cadhinor inflections. I could have explained it by inserting an extra vowel in the Cadhinor, but I was trying to make the system more regular as you go back in time. So I left a few oddities in Verdurian. (Another is the uniformity of the plural nominative... I really should have baradhui 'brothers' instead of baradhî. But I'm stuck with it.)