The alleged “lengthened” grades in the roots of some Latin nouns

Abstract

The article is concerned with Latin primary deverbative nouns whose lengthened root vowel is non-standard, as follows from the analysis given in Pultrová (2011a). In all the studied cases, the lengthening concerns the words with the roots ending in a voiced occlusive. Building on the analysis carried out in this article, I propose the hypothesis that vowel lengthening is the result of the shift of the original accent from the final syllable to other positions in the word.