Untersuchungen zu Daukšas Postille – II . Doppelakzentuierungen
Studies on Daukšas Postille - II. Double accents

Summary/Abstract: Among the words provided with accent marks in Daukša’s 1599 Postilla there are more than 7,000 word forms with a double marking of stress. Such cases have been explained either as printing errors or as Daukša’s intentional practice of representing competing (conservative and innovating) stress patterns within the same word. In this article an attempt is made to pay more attention to typographical aspects both in doubly- and simply-stressed forms. In the case of á there may be an adoption of the Polish typographical practice of marking an open a (‘a niepochylone’) with an accentual diacritic, apparently without distinctive vowel quality in Daukša´s Postilla. Within the a-, e-, i-, u-vowel series there are random interchanges of ‘complex vowel signs’ (i. e. vowel signs consisting of the respective simple vowel and some diacritic, e.g. é ~ ê ~ ȩ ~ ~ ę ~), which may be based on the typesetter’s partial neglect of the difference between the respective complex vowel signs. Among such interchanges there are a number of forms with double or unjustified simple accent marks which possibly allow a phonetic explanation (denasalization of nasal vowels) or may be due to ambiguous handwritten source (especially in the case of í and ú).

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