Re: CHAT: Importance of stress

> David Bell wrote:
>
> >Well, close enough.
> >
> >(3)     er.in.var
> >        or.carm.ar
> >        er.in.is
> >
> [snip]
> >> If so, then Amman Iar is weirder than I thought!  I was assuming that
> >> intervocalic single consonants syllabified with the following
> vowel, and
> >> that intervocalic consonant clusters and geminates were broken up
> >> (i.e. VCV is V.CV, and VCCV is VC.CV).  In other words, I was assuming
> >> the following syllabification:
> >>
> >> (2)     e.rin.var
> >>         or.car.mar
> >>         e.ri.nis
> >
> >Nope.  (3) can be shown to be the case by looking at the derivational
> >morphology of the words as well as the stress patterns.  erinvar
> and erinis
> >are derived from the same root erin (erin-var and erin-is). orcarmar is
> >derived from the root caram > carm (or-carm-ar).
>
> I don't mean to sound confrontational, but why should derivational
> morphology make any difference?  In natlangs, syllabification rules
> routinely ignore morphological boundaries.
Oh go ahead and be confrontational.  This wouldn't be any fun if everybody
agreed with everything I do! :-)

Natlang syllabification rules may routinely ignore morphological boundaries,
but amman iar clearly does not!

> When I asked what your Amman Iar intuitions were, I was referring
> to your intuitions about syllabification.  When you pronounce "erinis",
> do you really treat the "n" as syllable-final, and not syllable-initial?
> If you were to pronounce the word super-slowly, syllable by syllable,
> would you pause before or after the "n"?
Absolutely!  Its er'in.is.  -n is clearly syllable final.  e'.ri.nis sounds
distinctly foreign.  er'in.nis would be possible.

> I'm sorry to be bull-headed about this.  It's just that the analysis in
> (2) seems to make perfect sense of Amman Iar metrics, while the
> analysis in (3), in addition to going against known universal tendencies
> of syllabification, makes Amman Iar metrics rather messy.  If your
> intuition is that "erinis" is really "er.in.is" instead of "e.ri.nis",
> that's fine.  It's your conlang, after all.  But I just want to make
> sure that you're sure of that before I abandon my analysis.
Don't apologize, until this discussion came up, I hadn't even realized the
complexity involved here myself.  I have, however been pronouncing this
conlang with essentially the same phonology and stress patterns for a good
number of years now and so I'm very certain of my intuitions here.  A lot of
other things about the language have changed over the years, but these have
been fairly stable.  Just what universal tendencies of syllabification do
you feel are being violated here?  When I read amman iar, its sounds quite
natural to me.

David

David. E. Bell
The Gray Wizard
dbell@graywizard.net
www.graywizard.net

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