Re: CHAT: Importance of stress

>in amman iar the stress is always penultimate in 2-syllable words, as in
>niran [nir'an].  In longer words, it occurs penultimately if that syllable
>contains a vowel followed by two or more consonants as in orathval
>[orrath'val] or a diphthong as in erainin [erain'in].  If the penultimate
>syllable contains a simple vowel followed by a single consonant or another
>vowel, the stress falls on the syllable before it as in tarnarin [tar'narin]
>and nimroin [nim'roin].  Note that the digrams ch, th, dh, and sh represnt a
>single consonant, tus erathin [er'athin] not [erath'in].  Stress in amman
>iar is basically quantitative, i.e. syllables are distinguished by vowel
>length.
Aha!  The old Latin/Quenya stress rule!  A simpler way to state it would
be:  "Stress the penultimate syllable if heavy, otherwise stress the
antepenult."  Amman Iar, like Tokana and numerous natlangs, appears to
distinguish 'heavy' syllables (those ending in a consonant or diphthong/
long vowel) and 'light' syllables (those ending in a short vowel).

>Case endings (with notable exceptions among pronoun) cause gemination of the
>final root consonant and thereby shift the stress, e.g. adhan [adh'an],
>adhan+ERG > adhan+e > adhanne [adhann'e].
I wonder if maybe the stress shift is the primary change here, while
gemination is the concomitant change:  Case endings trigger a shift in
stress to the final syllable of the root.  Amman Iar metrical rules
prohibit light penultimate syllables from carrying stress, and so the
final consonant of the root undergoes gemination in order to transform
the penultimate light syllable into a heavy syllable.

If I were doing a linguistic analysis of Amman Iar, I might be tempted
to analyse gemination this way.  I guess the question to ask is:  What
happens if the root ends in a diphthong or consonant cluster?  Or do
such roots not exist?

Matt.