Original scientific paper
Rab Accent after Mate Hraste’s “Characteristics of Contemporary Accentuation on the Island of Rab” (1955)
Iva Lukežić
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia
Abstract
In his 1955 paper “Characteristics of Contemporary Accentuation on the
Island of Rab,” Mate Hraste presented his thoughts and observations on
the accent system of the Rab subdialects. According to him, in the 1950s the
accent system in the city of Rab, as described in Marcel Kušar’s paper “The Rab Dialect” from 1894, underwent two innovative processes (compared to the situation at the end of the 19th century):
• after the loss of the post-stress lengths, the process of losing pre-stress lengths was already in evidence; in some grammatical categories the process had already been completed, while in others it was still going on and was reflected in alternations;
• in all words that can be declined, the short-falling accent was in the process of being transferred to the syllable where the length originally used to be, while in nouns this accent is “frequently… transferred to the preceding originally short syllable without alternation…”.
Hraste believed that the incentive for these innovations came from the Štokavian dialect group, and was convinced that they originated in “the city of Rab subdialect,” from where they spread to the speech of villages on the rest of the island. He believed that these changes were specific to Rab: “it should be emphasized that these changes in the accent system were implemented faster (and they are still being implemented) than on any other Dalmatian island that was in the same situation as Rab.” These alarming remarks formed the subtext of two of my studies of Rab subdialects in mid 1980s, as well as of the interpretation of the linguistic data collected with the goal of providing a definitive classification of Rab accents at subdialectal level. The present paper presents and interprets this data while comparing it with Hraste’s data and his interpretation from 1955.
Keywords
Mate Hraste; Rab subdialects; accentuation
Hrčak ID:
144130
URI
Publication date:
31.1.2010.
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