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Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / A8 Dialects 528 / 600

And finally, I’ll use the following marks for two-syllable tones, where the stressed

syllable has another syllable with the high tone that follows it:

a...a short stressed + a high tone following it

aa...a long stressed

This can be summarized simply: the first underscored vowel is stressed, the

underscores mark high tones.

If you are going to read any dialectological works, you’ll see the standard ‘accent

marks’. Unfortunately, they are not rendered well on some mobile phones and e-

book readers, they are difficult to distinguish at small font sizes, and, finally, they are

quite counter-intuitive. Here's how my marks translate to the standard ones (the

diacritics are also shown in brackets):

aa = ā (–)

a = ȁ (\\)

aa = ȃ (^)

aa = ã (~)

a...a = à...a (\)

aa...a = á...a (/)

Therefore, what I write as e.g. öö is in most linguistic works written as ǫ with-atilde-above.

Stress systems in various dialects have the origin in the old system, reconstructed for

the old West South Slavic, for the period od some 1000 years ago, where there were

at least 2 tones on the syllables. The stress could have been on any syllable, and

unstressed syllables could be also short or long. The reconstructed forms of some

words are:

mlěěko milk

rööka hand

větər wind

kljuuč key (G kljuuča)

sestra sister (G-pl sestəər)

žena woman, wife (A ženö)

(It's possible to reconstruct even earlier forms – in many cases, thousands years

earlier – but they aren't important here.)

‘Kajkavian’ (Zagorje-Međimurje)

An example ‘Kajkavian’ dialect is the speech of Konjščina, with a detailed description

by Vedrana Gudek, available online.

The first impression anyone has about ‘Kajkavian’ are specific vowels. While there

are only 5 vowels in e.g. Zagreb, the traditional speech of Konjščina has many more:

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