Re: Quantity shift (was: Re: Native grammatical terms)

At 09:14 PM 11/21/03 +0100, you wrote:
>At 20:46 21.11.2003, Isidora Zamora wrote:
>
>>Which gives me an idea for making a related language.  I could have this
>>language also lose the vowel length distinction, while remembering where
>>the stress used to fall before the vowel length distinction was lost.  Thus
>>this language would move from having fixed stress to free stress.  (Or
>>something like free stress.  There would be a *lot* of words in the
>>language with unpredictable stress, but there would also be the underlying
>>pattern of penultimate stress shifting to the rightmost heavy syllable, and
>>a lot of those heavy syllables would still be identifiable because they are
>>made heavy by consonants rather than by the (now vanished) long vowels.)
>
>Whenever you are in doubt about which development to choose,
>create another dialect.  I'm at four dialects of Sohlob,
>not counting the Proto-Language (Kedjeb), and one
>cousin-language.
Making it a dialect of Trehelish might work well.  But any speaker of such
a dialect who wanted to be understood in other regions would be
well-advised to learn to speak a more standard dialect.  Trehelish with
free stress would sound very, very odd in the ears of any Trehel who spoke
a more standard dialect, and I am not certain how easily speakers of the
two dialects would be able to understand each other.  On the bright side,
they should be able to read the same written texts quite easily.

Trehelish does have a number of sister languages, only one of which has a
name at this point.  I know very little to nothing about the sister
languages and their cultures, except that they exist.  that gives me some
room to play, once the proto-language and culture have been invented.

Isidora