Stress shifting suffixes

Anthony Appleyard mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk
Thu Mar 29 08:04:58 UTC 2001


"David Sanchez" <davius_sanctex at terra.es> wrote:-
 > Most grammars of classical nahuatl accept that stress accent fall on the
 > penultimate vowel, althought this is not the case in modern dialects. ...

What tends to happen with the accent in modern dialects? I have seen Spanish
spellings with the accent on other syllables, e.g. "Tenochtitlán". It could be
that sometimes, when Spanish-speakers try to pronounce a Nahuatl name, a
stress on a short vowel may tend to move to an adjacent long vowel. Spanish
does not have phonemic length of vowels, and an uneducated Spanish-speaker
might produce stress when trying to say a long vowel. And post-Conquest,
Spanishisms get into Nahuatl: e.g. I read once of Spanish {de} = "of" getting
into Nahuatl, and causing the mixed-language combination {din} = {de in}.
Citlalyani



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