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

On Tue, 1 May 2001, Amanda Babcock wrote:

> 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?
What you could do is to create some vocabulary, and then record
where you feel stress should go without any preconceived notions
of rules. After you do a hundred or so words, see what you have;
I'm guessing that you'll find a definite pattern, maybe even
several. It (they) may turn out to be something like English--
then again, maybe not. The advantage to this method is that
you've created the stress system without having to codify rules.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga                          dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu

"The strong craving for a simple formula
has been the undoing of linguists."               - Edward Sapir

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