Among the Surinamese creoles, Sranan is a stress-accent language whereas both Ndyuka and Saramaccan exhibit phonological tone in addition to stress. Previous attempts to explain this historical divergence understand tone loss in Sranan to be directly associated with its innovation of complex onsets modeled after Dutch. Appealing to the argument of Aceto (1996) for the presence of CR-onsets in early Surinamese Creole, I contend that it was the opposite innovation in the maroon creoles-removal of liquid clusters via epenthesis and consequent intervocalic liquid deletion, producing heavy syllables-that contributed to the survival of distinctive phonological tone. 1 For more information regarding the history of the Surinamese Creoles, see Carlin,
This paper sets forth a new theory for the origin of the ancient Greek class of place-noun derivatives characterized by a stem formant that appears as either -ών- or -εών- depending on the dialect. In the classical period and afterward, the stem formant acts as a simple productive suffix that derives place-nouns from noun bases. I propose that these place-nouns were originally formed as further derivatives of derived adjectival bases. Later, but still at a relatively early stage of Greek, the combination of the genitival suffix -ε(ι)ο- and the substantivizing ‘Strabon suffix’ -ō̆n- was reanalyzed as monomorphemic and propagated as a productive unitary formant.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.