Historical Effects of Stress
It is common for stressed and unstressed syllables to behave differently as a language evolves. For example, in the Romance languages, the original Latin short vowels /e/ and /o/ have generally become diphthongs when stressed. Since stress takes part in verb conjugation, this has produced verbs with vowel alternation in the Romance languages. For example, the Spanish verb volver has the form volví in the past tense but vuelvo in the present tense (see Spanish irregular verbs). Italian shows the same phenomenon but with /o/ alternating with /uo/ instead. This behaviour is not confined to verbs; for example, Spanish viento "wind", from Latin ventum; or Italian fuoco from Latin focum'.
Read more about this topic: Stress (linguistics)
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