Re: Stress marking (was: Re: CONLANG Digest - 14 Oct 2000(maglangs plea!))

En réponse à Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>:

> Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> > I've always liked Spanish for that: you never wonder where stress is
>
> It's often redundant, even, with a knowledge of Spanish morphology.
> Like, -ico always causes antepenult stress (lógico, for example).  :-)
>
True enough, but it makes it only simpler :) .

> > And a last one in Reman: 'h' in Reman marks the semi-vowel /j/!
>
> Interesting.  How did <h> come to represent /j/?
>
Difficult to know. It seems that not long ago there's been a complete rebuilding
of the orthography (bringing for instance 'k' in nearly all positions where you
have /k/, except where it used to be 'qu' - in this case the 'u' was deleted,
leaving only 'q' for /k/ -, 'c' everywhere for /S/ and 'j' everywhere for /Z/)
with a real attempt to reach near-to-complete phonemicity (well, stress was
obviously forgotten in this attempt, but well... :) ). It seems that 'h' was
only a writing habit (like in Spanish), except in some cases (after consonnants)
where it seemed to mark palatalization (a little like in Portuguese 'lh' and
'nh'). This use was generalized to all cases where a sound /j/ appeared
(replacing 'i' in this role, it seems that one of the goals of the rebuilding
was to separate completely vowels and consonnants), and thus brought 'h' to
represent /j/. I don't know much more about it (in fact, the people speaking
Reman stay quite a mystery to me...)

Christophe.