Re: CHAT: Importance of stress

At 20:34 24/01/00 -0800, you wrote:
>No, this isn't about pressure from work, school or anything like that :),
>but it is about importance of stress in conlangs.
>
>I've always wondered how many other conlangs besides mine lay importance
>on stress to indicate the correct meanings of words? I found it a nifty
>feature of  Tagalog when I studied it because it seemed to allow you to
>stretch out the lexicon.
>
        Most of my conlangs have fixed stress (Notya, Azak, Moten has no
distinctive stress in fact, Tj'a-ts'a~n words are stressed on the last -or
first, I don't remember well- root syllable), so stress is not important
for them. Chasmäöcho has grammatical stress, that's to say the stress
depends on grammatical features and only on them, so here again it's of no
importance for the meaning of words (but it is important for their
pronunciation).

        But I like sometimes to toy with lexical stress. In fact, that's what I'm
gonna do with Itakian, where tone, despite its morphological constraints
and its grammatical meaning in some cases, is mainly lexical, and is thus a
way of opposing two words, just as you showed with stress.

                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org