Re: CHAT: Importance of stress

Barry Garcia wrote:

>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.
[snip]
>Anyway, as you can see in Tagalog it's an important feature. Likewise in
>Saalangal it's important, but the stress patter for roots is simpler,
>either it's on the penult, or the last syllable. For Saalangal, I can
>think of two examples that show the importance of stress in the language:
>
>ísan - mine
>isán - this
Sounds a bit like Tokana.  Tokana has a regular stress rule ("stress the
final syllable if the word ends in a consonant or a glide, otherwise
stress the penult"), but there are a handful of exceptions to this,
consisting of words which end in a vowel, but nevertheless are
stressed on the final syllable.  (Historically, these words ended in
an "h" or "f" which has since been deleted, or a geminate vowel which
has since been shortened.)  There are thus a few words which differ
solely in terms of stress placement:

íse - "snow"
isé - "to them"

hostánu - "from a dance"
hostanú - "danced" [stative]

A rightward shift in stress is also used to mark certain grammatical
distinctions.  For example, the instrumental case form of nouns
ending in "-a" is formed by shifting stress to the final syllable:

te tómla - "the mountain"
itán tomlá - "on/across the mountain"

Matt.