Re: USAGE: heuristics for Russian stress?
| From: | Alex Fink <000024@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, November 16, 2008, 22:35 |
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On Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:04:09 -0500, Amanda Babcock Furrow
<langs@...> wrote:
>On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 03:58:37PM -0500, Alex Fink wrote:
>
>> Suppose that I knew the Cyrillic script, and if necessary certain rudiments
>> of Russian morphosyntax, but nothing about the Russian lexicon; and suppose
>> I was called upon to read a Russian text aloud. What heuristics might I use
>> to guess where the word stresses went?
>
>None that I know of. Stress creates minimal pairs in Russian, which tells
>you all by itself that it cannot be predicted.
Sure, I know it's phonemic; I'm never going to manage to get everything
correct. But that doesn't mean there's no way to take an educated guess.
It's quite likely that there are several rules, or at least of thumb, by
which most words (or nouns, or verbs... in a certain case, tense, ...) of a
certain phonetic or orthographic shape, or morphological composition, or
etymological origin, or so forth, can have their stress predicted. Aren't
there?
Alex
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