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From: rmt51@cas.org ()
Subject: Re: Hungarian / Czecho-Slovakian
Message-ID: <1995Jan25.225334.18193@chemabs.uucp>
Sender: Rick Turkel (rturkel@ca.org)
Organization: Chemical Abstracts Service, Columbus, Ohio
References: <rharmsen.176.00160003@knoware.nl>
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 1995 22:53:34 GMT
Lines: 43

In article <rharmsen.176.00160003@knoware.nl>,
Ruud Harmsen <rharmsen@knoware.nl> wrote:
>Is anything known about non-related but adjacent languages, that have
>striking similarities other than in borrowed words? E.g. Czecho-Slovak

Czech and Slovak are two distinct languages, although they share many
common features.

>and Hungarian share the stress on the first syllable and the distinction
>between long and short vowels. Both are also found in Finnish, but not in
>(any?) other Slavic languages.

Bzzzt!  Serbocroatian and Slovenian also have length distinctions, but
the former, too, borders Hungarian-speaking regions.  In addition, the
stress accent in Serbocroatian is generally shifted one syllable toward
the front of the word from where it was in Common Slavic (or where it is
in Bulgarian and Russian cognates).  If I remember correctly, vowel
length was phonemic in Common Slavic, so I think this feature may be
native to Slavic languages but was lost in most of them.

All of the above notwithstanding, I've always thought there must be some
causal relationship between the word-initial stress in Czech and Slovak
and the fact that the Hungarians have lived only a stone's throw away
for over a millenium.  Historically, large numbers of Slovaks have been
bilingual (in Hungarian), so an influence certainly is reasonable.

>Other examples: Esperanto and Polish both have the stress on the penultimate

This isn't too hard to explain - Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, was
born in Poland.  Besides, for those European languages that have a fixed
stress, more seem to have it on the penult than anywhere else.

>syllable, (flame bait), and Basque seems to have phonetic similarities with
>Spanish, despite being extremely unrelated.
>And is it a coincidence that the name of the Guaran language of Paraguay
>can be written so well in Spanish?


-- 
Rick Turkel         (___  _____  _  _  _  _  __     _  ___   _   _  _  ___
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