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Anatoly Liberman's recent article in this journal (“The phonetic organization of Early Germanic” 2,1:1990) contains a number of potentially important claims about the nature of early Germanic accentuation. (1) His major conclusion appears to be twofold: first, the syllable struture of early Germanic disyllabics must have normally been CVC.V (using “.” to represent a syllable boundary), because CV (and by extension therefore CV.CV) was not a possible structure of a Gothic word. Second, early Germanic possessed no lexical stress (“word stress”), but instead only phrasal stress. (2) These conclusions are at least provocative to those familiar with the massive literature on Germanic accentology, and this was no doubt their intent. In this brief piece, I would like to note several implications and possible extensions of the points Liberman raises and the conclusions he draws, but also to disagree on some points. My perspective here differs from Liberman's primarily in focusing not on early Germanic in relation to its attested daughter languages, but rather on Germanic vis-à-vis Indo-European and some data from the languages of the world, that is, typological data. |
