Re: OT: Spanish "me da feliz"

Tristan:
<<
Why? What is special about n and s that they repel the stress? Is this
purely historic and more of a coincidence or was there a period in the
language when n and s actively repelled the stress?
 >>

No, and they don't do so always.  Consider all the words that
end in -ion (accent mark over the "o").  When it comes to
orthography, though, a word that ends in a consonant other
than "n" or "s" always has ultimate stress *unless marked otherwise*.
There are a ton of nouns that end in "n" that have final marked
stress, and probably a number of singular nouns that end in "s"
that have final stress too (at present, I can't think of a singular
noun in Spanish that ends in "s").

The reason that final stress is marked orthographically on words
ending in "n" or "s" is, I figure, because there are so many
morphological "n" or "s" endings where stress isn't final (if it
were final, there'd just be a ton of words with final stress).
Consider that a normal present tense paradigm looks like
this:

1sg.: -o
2sg.: -(a/e)s
3sg.: -(a/e)
1plu.: -(a/e)mos
2/3plu.: -(a/e)n

All of these are stressed on the penultimate (for all but 1plu.,
that stress will occur on the stem, not the affix).  If you expand
this to the other tenses, *and* include the fact that just about
ever plural in Spanish ends in "s", it begins to seem very
reasonable that "s" and "n" in certain specific circumstances
seem to repel stress.

-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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