Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

durational asymmetry was absent altogether. The resistance of Dravidian initial syllables
is especially apparent in the massive syncopations of non-initial vowels found throughout
the language family, and most dramatically attested in Toda and Kota (Zvelebil 1990:
3) 119 . Dhangar Kurux, cited by Beckman as contrasting nasal and oral vowels in initial
syllables only lost original vowels, while reducing most other non-initial short vowels to
an ultra-short schwa, later restored to “syllabicity” as short copies of the initial (Gordon
1976). Bosch (1991) notes that Tamil, another language with a restricted inventory of
vowel contrasts outside the initial syllable, also has initial stress (albeit not strongly cued
by durational). Andronov argues that Classical Tamil must have had initial stress
(Andronov 1975: 6) (while arguing that in must have shifted rightward in Colloquial
Tamil to account for central vowel deletions from etymological initial syllables).
Balasubramanian (1980) reports native speaker intuition of stress on initial syllables of
words in isolation and lengthening of various elements thereof when the relevant word
“has to be said with special emphasis” (Balasubramanian 1980: 456).
A similar state of affairs may obtain in Gujurati, where the stress pattern is
somewhat less clear. Cardona (1965) describes it as a close derivative of the accent
system of Classical Sanskrit (stress a heavy penult, else stress the antepenult - Bubenik
119 Resulting in forms such as Kota anrccvdk, ‘because of the fact that (someone) will cause (someone)
to terrify (someone)’.
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