Re: Hadwan stress system renewed

From: "dirk elzinga" <dirk.elzinga@...>
>> Stress on everything else can fall only on the first three syllables of a
>> word.  The heaviest (and, in a tie, the rightmost) of these syllables
>> receives the stress.  So:
>
>I don't think I've ever seen a three syllable window at the left
>edge of a word, but I don't know why it shouldn't be possible.
Yeah, I looked in the stress database
<http://www-cogsci.psych.ox.ac.uk/~todd/stress.html> and didn't see anything
like it.

(BTW,) with their system of representing things this Hadwan stress would be:
321/321/321L    VV(N)K > VV(N), V(N)K > V(N)

>> Coda sonorants don't count towards syllable weight...
>
>Now this is weird. If there were a distinction among the
>moraicity (weight-bearing-ness) of consonants, you'd expect
>sonorants to be moraic but obstruents to be non-moraic. But hey;
>if it works for you, go with it.
It *is* weird.  Many of the sonorants, though, used to be syllabic, which
may have something to do with it.  (Or maybe that's an excuse and not an
excuse.)

>> I don't know what to do with borrowed words, however.  Should a word like
>> "kétos" be stressed normally (on the final syllable) or as in the
original
>> Greek (on the primary syllable)?  Might it depend, maybe, on how
'nativized'
>> the word is?  Hmm..
>
>Yes. One of my very favorite examples in historical linguistics
>is the multiple borrowing into English of the French word
>'gentil'. From it we get gentle, gentile, genteel, and jaunty
>(in that order). This illustrates the nativization process
>pretty well, I think.
Ok.

>> I'm still not sure about (or whether) secondary stress, either.
>>
>> Any comments?
>
>If you have morphologically determined main stress, but
>phonologically determined secondary (perhaps via mora counting),
>that would be fun ...
I may do something like that for the longer verbs.  But actually most words
don't seem to get very long, and I may not have to worry about that .. too
much .. yet.

Today I finally finished translating Genesis 1 from LXX Greek to Hadwan.
[Thanks to Perseus's dictionary.  I only know exactly enough Greek to hang
myself with.]  The longest word is five syllables:  <hítsoskidzoñtseñ>
"seed-sowing-ACC", which is cheating since it's a compound of <hítsos>
"seed" and <skidzós> (skidzoñts-) "sowing".

The next-longest words are four syllables:
roumalosho - "sky-GEN"
shoniritsor - "happened-3s"
gaioñtsawoñ - "living-GEN-PL" (a mistake? I'd expect "gaioñtsóñ")
systématís - "collection-ACC-PL"
hoñtsirrourits - "separated-3s"

(That last one's another compound: <hoñtsir> "between" and <romi> "make
room".)

If anyone really wants to see the first chapter of "Háwarhai" ('in the
Beginning') along with what I had to start with, and a general English gloss
(no morpheme-by-morpheme interlinear, though), try here:

[619K, 4pg PDF]  http://personal.southern.edu/~alrivera/Arhai_1.pdf

(It ought to work.  I don't know much about PDFs though. I just tried it and
the fonts seemed to come in late.  But my copy of Acrobat Reader never
seemed to work right.)

    *Muke!