Re: Unilang: the Prosodics

On Thu, 19 Apr 2001, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:

[snip]
> But it would still be advantageous, I believe, to maintain one prosodic
> feature in the unilang, albeit with a good deal of freedom in its
> representation: _accent_. A simple accent feature could be extremely
> valuable to the lexicon, and possibly the morphology as well. So each word
> (clitics excepted) would have some climatic syllable, an accented syllable;
> I am speaking of a phonemic accent.
>
> So what kind of accent? Well, any; any clearly audible emphasis on a single
> syllable. Be it pitch, stress, lengthening, volume. Any human should be
> relatively capable of this.
I like this.  Mainly because I keep pitch-accenting Latin because my ear
hears the long vowels as "stressed" and wants to compensate, and my
native method of compensation seems to be pitch.  At the same time,
though, is it easy for people used to detecting one kind of accent to
detect another kind?  Frex, for the longest time I couldn't figure out
what kind of accent Korean had, because I'd been indoctrinated in the
American English stress? volume? accent.  Then I started getting
interested in Japanese and learned about pitch accent.  And then I
realized that Korean was pitch-accented, and that putting the pitch in
the wrong place sounded *really* weird, whereas stressing random
syllables sounded, well, American (all the GI's wandering around Seoul,
I'm sure :-p).  But until I came to that realization, my brain didn't
even tell me about the pitch variations even though I could tell when
they were wrong.

Vowel length I would probably tend to "hear" as stress, unless I missed
it entirely...and from the time an Arabic speaker did a language demo for
phonetics/phonology, I know I'm *really* good at missing it.  <sigh>

YHL