ABSTRACT
British and Welsh The view held by scholars during the first part of this century was that heavy penultimate stress in Late British triggered the loss of its final syllables. This process, purported to have begun towards the end of the fifth century and completed by the middle of the sixth, is singled out as the crucial feature marking the death of British and birth of Welsh and its sister neo-British languages. Proponents of this theory claim that loss of finals
. .. inevitably resulted in the disintegration of the British case-terminations and brought about a great transformation in the whole syntactical and morphological character of the language. Welsh had recourse ... to the use of prepositions, word-order or juxtaposition, and other devices to compensate for the loss of the old inflection endings.
