this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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No downloading a random PDF ..
But I'm guessing it's referring to the standardization of spelling/grammar that happened when Dutch workers ran the first English printing press?
The paper is called Noun-Verb Stress Alternation: An Example of the Lexical Diffusion of Sound Change in English, in case you want to look it up.
No. TL;DR the author picked data from a bunch of old dictionaries that showed stress info. Then he compared where they place the stress for a sample of 150 noun-verb pairs. Here's the result:
Diatone = paroxytone noun + oxytone verb. Note how the value changes over time, in a rather consistent way, already starting at least in the 1600s. It has nothing to do with the printing press, English doesn't even show stress in the standard orthography.
The author proposes this is a good example of lexical diffusion - the diatone stress pattern slowly spreads through analogy, from a handful of verbs to others. And since the process is slow, it's still happening, and different dialects may or may not have the diatone stress pattern spread to a specific verb. Sometimes you also see reversals, specially diatone→paroxytonic (English places the stress preferentially in the first syllable).
The only major external (non-English) interference I've seen in this would be loanwords from French, it seems to me they have a higher tendency to become or stay oxytonic.
Ah ok.
Kind of related, the vowel/stress change was happening when printing was solidifying Grammer and spelling rules.
Which is why things are spelled one way and pronounced another.
It was a language in flux where decisions were made by non native speakers who would just go on gut instinct.
It's still happening. People often treat sound and grammar changes as if they were instant ramen, 3min and it's done, but they often take centuries.
Another example of the same process is the regularisation of strong verbs:
And some are left unfinished, like the plurals - it started in Old English time but you still see pairs like child/children, sheep/sheep, goose/geese.
All of that is internal to the language. It doesn't really need external influences, like the printing press. All you need is children "filling the gaps": learning an word but not the associated irregular forms, filling them with rules they already learned, and eventually keeping that new form later on.
All languages are in a perpetual flux. That said I don't think non-native speakers are a meaningful force in this.