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Hadwan stress system renewed

From:Muke Tever <alrivera@...>
Date:Saturday, July 28, 2001, 3:54
Well, the talk about stress inspired me to study, and I found an actually
consistent way of accenting Hadwan words.  (Before I was going by ear and
partly influenced by the vocalization of the proto-root.  I only had to
change a couple of words to fit.)  Now I don't have to mark stress anymore,
and acute accents are free to mark long vowels instead of clunky macra ;p or
diereses.

Stress on verbs is morphological: in the nonpast the first syllable of the
ending is stressed and in the past tense the last syllable of the stem is
stressed.   So:

        bá-mai     /BQ:"mAI/   "I say/am saying"
        rour-eñ    /"rUwrEN/   "I made room for smth."
        gigwi-mizh /gI"gwImIZ/ "We have lived"

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:

        ámirá    /Q:mI"rQ:/    "day, daytime"
          [á2. mi1. -> rá2]

        kicorsos /kItsUr"sUs/   "fourth"
          [ki1. cor1. sos2]

        áñcihwai /"Q:NtsIxwai/ "in order to"
          [-> áñ2. ci1. hwai1]

        móros    /mu:"rUs/     "a sea (gen.)"
          [mó2. -> ros2]

        óforos   /u:fU"rUs/    "fruit-bearing"
          [ó2. fo1. ros2]

        óforosho /"u:fUrUSU/   "fruit-bearing (gen.)"
          [-> ó2. fo1. ro1.] sho1

Coda sonorants don't count towards syllable weight...

Some words still have idiosyncratic stress, however.  This usually is
because Hadwan dropped initial unstressed /e/ and /i/ from its parent but
retained the original stress:

        jormos  /jUr"mUs/  "collection"

looks normal but

        jormosho /jUr"mUSU/ "(gen.)"

appears where /jUrmU"SU/ would be expected, because the stress is
"remembered" from the earlier *iGor"moSo.  (You might say it's also
'remembered' on regular <jormos>, but in that case the outcome would be the
same either way anyway, so it doesn't matter.)

[A northern dialect developed a consistent nonverb stress on the second
syllable.  This dialect still is affected by the previous rule, and accents
the first syllable of words like <jormos>.]

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..

I'm still not sure about (or whether) secondary stress, either.

Any comments?

How much of this is actually impossible?

    *Muke!

Reply

dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>