OT: YAEPT: emphasis

On 6/22/06, Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...> wrote:
> I'm really bad at questions of stress, at least which of two stressed
> syllables bares the primary stress.
I know several other people who say the same, and I totally fail to
understand it.  To me, stress is such an obvious component of
pronunciation.  And it drive me nuts when I encounter words stressed
in an unnatural way -  to make them fit into the rhythm of a poem or
song lyric, for instance.  Total cheating.

One of my favorite pop-cultural misemphases occurs in the movie Star
Trek III, when McCoy - in the thrall of Spock's katra - attempts to
book illegal travel to the Genesis planet, and his shady interlocutor
informs him that the price goes up because more permits will be
required.  McCoy's response:

"Permit?  I don't need any damned permits!  How can you get a damned
permit to do a damned illegal thing?!"

Throughout the above he consistently says /p@r'mIt/, rather than
/'p@r.mIt/.  And at least IML, the noun is always the latter; the
former is the verb.


--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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