Towards a Comprehensive Account of the Stress of Russian Nouns Containing the Combining Form -лог

Abstract

The Russian combining form -лог (English -logist/-loger/-log/-logue/-logy, French -logue, German -log(e)) ultimately goes back to the Greek -λογος, and occurs for the most part in compound nouns of a specialised (i. e. scientific or technical) nature. The initial components of such words are generally of Greek and Latin origin, and this combining form is essentially, therefore, not an integral part of Russian word formation, but, rather, occurs in compound words which are borrowed as whole units (generally from French, German, Polish and, more recently, English).2 However, from the point of view of stress, such words can be said to form a single corpus given the phonetic uniformity of their final syllable (i. e. -лог) which functions as a kind of suffix. In standard modern Russian nouns in -лог display a near uniformity of (fixed, i. e. non-mobile) stress on the penultimate syllable with a few cases of (fixed) final stress (e. g. биолог ‘biologist’, but диалог ‘dialogue’). On the synchronic level it is precisely this incomplete uniformity of stress which is of interest. In addition, on the diachronic level, historical evidence reveals that considerable change of stress has occurred in words containing -лог during the last three centuries. Two substantial analyses of the stress characteristics of words containing -лог have been made, one by Kiparsky (1962, 158–161), and the other by Superanskaja (Суперанская 1968, 152–156). Both their analyses are essentially diachronic in approach and identify an almost complete shift in the stress of such words, at least those denoting areas of human specialisation, from the final syllable to the penultimate syllable. Thus, for example, historical sources reveal that the stress of астролог ‘astrologer’ has changed from астролог in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to астролог in the twentieth century. According to Kiparsky (1962, 158–161), while the tendency towards penultimate stress has been completely generalised in the case of compound words containing the final component -граф so that no anomalies remain (e. g. фотограф ‘photographer’), and almost none in the case of -метр (e. g. барометр ‘barometer’, but сантиметр ‘centimetre’), there has been a conscious effort on the part of lexicographers to halt the progress of this same tendency with words containing -лог. Thus Kiparsky (ibid., 160) notes that for four words penultimate stress is expressly not permitted: каталог (not каталог) ‘catalogue’, минералог