Re: CHAT: Blandness (was: Uusisuom's influences)

On Sun, 1 Apr 2001, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> >How have other people handled stress/accent?
> >
> >YHL
>
> In my "main" conlang Tairezazh, the golden rule is "the first syllable of
> the word stem receives the stress". There's some loanwords that violate this
> rule, however, and in some words what originally was a prefix have ceased be
> be preceived as a such and then attracted the stress. Eg the adj _ilein_
> "immortal", from _lein_ "mortal", is stressed on the second syllable, but
> the name _Ileina_, derived from this adj, is normally stressed on the first
> nowadays (ie in the "present" of my conuniverse). In compounds, the first
> syllable of the stem of the first component receives the stress.
Neat.  :-)  It must be fun setting up evolution like that.

> In Tairezazh's sister language Steianzh (or Steienzh to use its own term),
> the stress is always on the first syllable of a word, and ALL unstressed
> vowels are reduced to schwa. The alphabet these langs are written in have no
> sign for schwa, so the sign for "e" is used instead. The words above are in
> Steianzh _lein_, _ilen_, _Ilene_. For obvious reasons, prefices are often
> avoided in Steianzh ...
<whistle>  Yeah, I can see that.  Do Tairezazh speakers grumble about
those lazy Steianzh speakers who mumble everything and can't get their
vowels right?  :-)

YHL