Continuing to look through Michael Weiss’s Elementary Lessons in Tocharian B (see yesterday’s post), I was struck by a word in this passage:
In Classical Tocharian B ä and a, on the one hand, and a and ā, on the other, are in an alternation governed by the position of the stress. These rules are not yet in place in the archaic texts. In general, disyllabic words have initial stress and tri- and more syllabic words have stress on the second syllable from the left edge of the word, so-called peninitial stress. In tonic position ä becomes a and in atonic position ā become[s] a.
Who was so-called peninitial stress so called by? Not me, I didn’t remember ever encountering the word (though it turns out it occurs in a passage quoted by DM here); while I can see the rationale for it (if stress on the next-to-last syllable is penultimate, why can’t stress on the syllable after the first be peninitial?), I don’t like the word — it looks too much like penitential. It’s not in the OED, but there’s a Wiktionary page which says it’s “(chiefly linguistics),” and a Google Books search confirmed that. But I was a grad student in linguistics; why didn’t I know the word? Judging from the Google Books hits, it seems to have gotten going in the 1980s, just after I had gotten gone from the field. Are Hatters familiar with it?
I’m not sure what “peninitial stress” conveys that “second-syllable stress” wouldn’t convey. Since we conventionally count syllables from the beginning, being able to specify e.g. “penultimate stress” is useful because which syllable is the penultimate one will vary in a count from the beginning. I don’t see a parallel usefulness here, before even getting into the ease of confusion with “penitential.”
Was it imported from some other language where the equivalent of “second syllable” is significantly more unwieldy?
I’m not sure what “peninitial stress” conveys that “second-syllable stress” wouldn’t convey.
That was my thought as well.
And postpeninitial too, why not.
Let me be the third or possibly fourth or fifth to support using ordinal numbers for this purpose.
By the way, are one-first and two-second considered official examples of suppletion?
This is pen- as in English peninsula < Latin paeninsula 'peninsula' = Latin paen[e] 'almost, barely' + insula 'island'. Likewise seen in English penultimate.
(Yes, I at first misread the title as Penitential.)
Latin paen[e] ‘almost, barely’
What’s with this “left edge”? I know we have no Tocharian speakers, only writing, and it’s left to right. Never the less, I’d expect a Linguist to be thinking of the sound pattern/syllable structure. Is the “left edge” in writing not the start of the first syllable? Ah, maybe not, this from AI overview, quoting (possibly) The phonology of Tocharian (paywalled):
Then do we count a CCVC cluster as two-syllable/the V as peninitial?
2010 The Tocharian Verbal System, M. Malzahn has a great deal more in Chapter One Sound Laws. Above my pay-grade, but that also uses ‘from the left’ [page 3].
@AntC: Let the right-to-left jihadists attack the Chomskyans for promoting the unexamined metaphor that human speech proceeds left to right! (I know there are supposed to be languages that don’t adopt the metaphor that the past is situated behind us and the future in front of us …)
By the way, are one-first and two-second considered official examples of suppletion?
Garden variety official suppletion.