Szemerényi Oswald. Syncope in Greek and Indo-European and the Nature of Indo-European Accent

Naples: Istituto Orientale, 1964 ― xviii+430 p. — (Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli, Quaderni della Sezione Linguistica, iii).It seems generally agreed today that the vocalism of pre-Hellenistic Greek was unusually stable. The inherited forms, and even the newly acquired words, were with admirable tenacity preserved ― as far as their vocalism was concerned; the consonantal system is admitted to have undergone revolutionary changes. This privileged position of the vowel-system is ascribed to the pitch-accent which allegedly is incompatible with the kind of vowel-loss known from languages all over the world. The aim of the present study is to show that this doctrine is untenable. In a considerable number of instances pre-Hellenistic Greek suffered vowel-losses which can only be described as syncopes of the well-known type.