Zompist Bboard Again

If Proto Germanic developed syllabe timed phonotactics with stress on penultimate syllabe instead of heavy initial stress, and kept it for most of history, do you see Germanic languages developing in a different direction than they did?

That's a definite possibility, yes.

Any broad trends that can be drawn?

For example consonant clusters are a result of strong initial stress leading to loss of vowels in unstressed syllabes. Loss of final syllabes like in *kuningaz -*kuninga - "kuning seems to be caused by this as well.

It would depend at least in part, I'm sure, upon the strength of the stress — */kuningaz/, if the last heavy non-inflectional syllable becomes stressed > */kə'ningaz/ > */'kningz~kninks/ could easily happen, simply producing a monosyllable differently; if the pretonic or post-tonic syllable one tends to be kept, you could end up with */ky'ningəz/ or /kjə'nengaz/ or any number of other things. It would probably also be affected by what was causing the shift in stress. If it's spontaneous, if it's through early contact with Latin from Germanic settlement in Italy or somewhere near it, or some other reason. If you want to make a Germanic language to your liking that follows such a pattern, you have only to consult your own ideas on what you want to make and work from there, if you have some context in mind instead, it's best to work from there.

IIRC in syllabe timed languages the actual stress on the stressed syllabe is much weaker so vowel reduction generally does not happen

It can be, whence "depend on the strength of the stress"; if the stress were to become very much weakened, certainly reduction or loss would be less-likely, except perhaps in very frequent or very long words.

Otto, please put "what if" questions in the Conlangery thread. Speculations are fine and fun, but have no linguistic answers. It's conlanging, so it belongs in that forum.

zompist wrote: ↑Thu Apr 01, 2021 9:43 am Otto, please put "what if" questions in the Conlangery thread. Speculations are fine and fun, but have no linguistic answers. It's conlanging, so it belongs in that forum.

I actually firstt posted it in conlangery and then deleted the thread thinking it belongs here