# Bulgarian: Shifting stress in aorist



## Kartof

Only lately have I noticed that most older Bulgarian speakers I know tend to pronoun aorist verbs with the stress on the last syllable instead of the second to last syllable like most younger people I know (maybe its just the group of people I know, this may not apply generally).  For example, I said- /каз'ах/ vs. /к'азах/.  Now of course in Bulgarian not stressing a syllable causes vowel reduction in most cases (especially in the east), in this case featuring the /a/ -> /ъ/ shift.  Why then have I never noticed this substantial pronunciation difference before I happened to skim across it in a grammar book? Only after this did I begin to pick up these differences in stress.  How did these two acceptable yet different pronunciations develop here?


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## civ

I dont know what 'aorist verb' is, but I am from Plovdiv and both of these sound natural to me.  For example, I would say kazAh when it's transitional in the middle of a sentence and i am trying to capitalize on something after it.


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## Kartof

Aorist means 'минало свършено време'.


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## iobyo

It mightn't mean anything, but some northern Macedonian dialects also have the stress on the final syllable in aorist forms: _зедó_, _видó_, _гледá_ and so forth.


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## osemnais

As far as I recall from reading this, it's a dialectal difference, in one part of the dialects the stress falls only on the last syllable and in the other part only on the root syllable and the literary language allows both usages iirc. This is only about verbs without prefix, there were different set of rules for the ones with.


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## civ

I am no linguist, but i don't think there's anything special about it. Same as in English with -ing, you can freely choose to stress it or not.  It gets a little trickier with shorter verbs where dialect might start to play a role and there might be a desire to unstress a vowel in order to reduce it which could lead to preference of one form over the other... or if you dont do vowel reduction (is there such a thing?) it would lead to preference of the other.  But i dont think any of that is true, because in this case the tone dictates stress NOT dialect/accent.  In any case... if stress was not free somewhere it wouldn't be across the board of all -ах verbs and only isolated occurrences or else i wouldn't be able to dictate the tone.


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## Kartof

civ said:


> I am no linguist, but i don't think there's anything special about it. Same as in English with -ing, you can freely choose to stress it or not.


That's not true, you can never stress the English -ing ending.

I don't understand, are you suggesting that choosing a certain stress on a verb is a choice of tone as opposed to dialect or accent?


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## civ

Its not the standard form of a verb and who says you cant stress -ing?  Or -ът/та/то/ти/те?  Its a suffix, i can treat it however i want... same as  -ах/ех/их etc.


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## Kartof

Exactly, they're suffixes so their stress depends on that of the word that they're attached to.  I repeat, -ing can never, ever be stressed!  It just isn't.  As someone who speaks English all day, every day, I've never heard it stressed.


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## civ

For some reason this is very hard for me to believe.  Common sense tells me that if there is any such rule it would be for exceptions where stressing the suffix would interfere with the root word... Its perfectly possible to treat suffixes as  separate words like 90% of the time as far as i can tell and stressing it wouldnt change anything but tone.


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## Kartof

Stress is an inherent quality of the word and the purpose of this thread was to inquire on why the stress placement was variable for the aorist in Bulgarian as it isn't variable for most words in most languages.  While adding suffixes may change the phonetic properties of words in some languages, it really varies depending on how the language choses to treat this.  Suffixes are not separate words and you can't impart stress freely on them upon whim, unless you have the option. -ах/ех/их aren't suffixes either, but tense endings and so they are integral parts of the word.  

In English, you cannot ever alter stress on a word for tone.  You can stress the stressed syllable more or less as you desire but you certainly can't move the stress around in the word however you'd like!  The -ing ending for certain doesn't change the stress of the word that it's attached to and it certainly never takes on its own stress.


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## osemnais

civ said:


> Its perfectly possible to treat suffixes as  separate words


 No, its not. Bulgarian doesnt work that way. The suffix is an indivisible part of the word and it has only one stress(some longer word have a secondary stress, but that's another topic). I dont know what's the situation like in colloquial language and some do may use it to change the logical stress as you say, but that's simply wrong in standard language and in dialectal speech also.


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## civ

I was just thinking out loud on here trying to make sense of it, thats all...  It seems i was confusing stress with tone.  Anyway, sorry for hijacking the thread.


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## eth1

Well, the correct spelling is: /к'азах/, /к'азвам/ . Rest of the interpretations are just dialect forms.


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