Palatalization, fortition and deletion in the high vowels of Arcadian Greek

Abstract

The present study discusses the status of the high vowels /i/ and (secondarily) /u/ in Arcadian Peloponnesian, an entirely unstudied variety of Greek. The high vowels of Arcadian Greek undergo different processes or are altogether deleted in an unstressed environment. In particular, unstressed [i] palatalizes or undergoes fortition (depending on the target consonant) or gets deleted. Kochetov (2016) argues that palatalization and fortition work in parallel as repair strategies in languages affecting different target consonants, so that marked C+palatal sequences are avoided. This seems to be the motivation behind the widely attested palatalization and fortition in nonstandard Greek varieties more generally, which may need to be unified under one pandialectal study in the future. Until now, high vowel deletion has been thought to be restricted to northern dialects of Greek and has constituted a defining criterion for the classification of Greek dialects in the literature.