Re: Tekem, the language (aka deriving verbs from nouns)

On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 09:50:45AM -0500, Dan Seriff wrote:

> Very nice!
Thanks :)

> This strikes me as a rather elegant sound-change system. I really like
> voiced fricatives, especially back ones.
I used to be not so keen on voicing, but it's gradually won me over.
Probably because so many people on this list have made beautiful languages
full of voiced consonants and sonorants :)

> After seeing what you've done with Tekem, I may give Ylank another shot.
Glad I could help! :)

> >         tekembaDal
>
> I love this word! How does the stress fall? I want to put it on the 2d syllable.
As I mentioned in the survey, I'm woefully bad at stress, even though my
best foreign language is Russian, which puts a lot of emphasis on stress
(so to speak :).  When I include stress in a conlang, I forget to use it.
I haven't come up with stress for tekem yet, so I've been pronouncing it
instinctively as in English; this means that I've been stressing the 2nd
syllable of "tekembaDal" too.

I could codify it as "stress falls on the last syllable of the final root
morpheme in the word", i.e. right before all the derivational ones, and make
this pronunciation of "tekembaDal" official.  But it strikes me that I'd
be stressing the unchanging part of a large complex of words, possibly
making it harder to hear the differences between them.  What do people think
about this?  Maybe certain classes of derivational affixes could "steal"
the stress from earlier in the sentence, while others would leave it alone?
If so, should these affixes steal the stress onto themselves, or onto the
preceding syllable?

Amanda

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