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

Amanda Babcock wrote:

> 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?
My stress system in Mungayöd is what I've been calling "anti-recessive"
(if there's a better name for it, please let me know). I came up with it
when I was taking Classical Greek, and fell in love with the recessive
accenting of verbs.

Basically, the way it works (for any part of speech) is relatively
simple. Stress can fall on the penult, antepenult or ante-antepenult. It
naturally gravitates towards the penult, but if that syllable is a short
vowel (short by quality, a la English, not by duration (Mungayöd has no
durational distinction)), it will move back towards the beginning of the
word until it finds a long vowel.[*] If all three possible syllables are
short, then stress will fall on the antepenult. Obviously, words of 3 or
fewer syllables can't follow the rules fully, but will do so as well as
possible. The side effect of this, at least with verbs, is that
sometimes the root will lose its stress to the inflection, some of which
are two syllables. Example:

hushu - to love

hushuka         hushuvak
hushuwis                hushuweis
hushuti         hushufeila

In all persons but 3PP, the stress falls on the penult, but, since [ei]
is a long vowel, the stress moves over to the ending (which contains the
penult now). In some of the other verbal permutations, especially the
subjunctive, it happens more than once in a person-number synopsis.

One of these days, I'll actually get a complete lexicon up on my
webpages, and complete my reference grammar and Mungayöd course. Then
I'll just be able to refer you to the web. Won't that be nice? :)

[*] - a note: in Mungayöd, you know the vowel is long because it has no
diacritic. I didn't do that on purpose when I was designing the
Romanization, it just wound up that way by accident. Convenient, huh?

> Amanda
--
Daniel Seriff
microtonal@sericap.com
http://members.tripod.com/microtonal

Futharusào li utsoto wi pæthong, raskèsào lang li!
Si me iterum insanum appelles, oculum alterum tuum edem.