Re: CHAT: Importance of stress

David Bell wrote:

>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.
Some linguists have argued that syllabification tends to follow the
following set of constraints:

-- Avoid vowel-initial syllables whenever possible
-- Avoid consonant-final syllables whenever possible
-- Avoid clusters of two or more consonants within the same syllable

I've ranked these constraints in order of inviolability (based on cross-
linguistic tendencies).  These constraints would produce the following
syllabification patterns, which seem to be valid for a large number of
natlangs that I'm aware of:

(1)  VCV is almost always syllabified as V.CV, not VC.V

(2)  VCCV is typically syllabified as VC.CV, not V.CCV or VCC.V

(3)  VCCCV is typically syllabified as VC.CCV or VCC.CV, not
VCCC.V or V.CCCV

Although (2) and (3) are violated in many languages, some linguists
have argued that (1) is a strong tendency - a near universal, even.

Of course, the question of how to syllabify consonants is complicated
in some languages (like English) which display "ambisyllabicity"
effects.  In certain VCV sequences in English, native speaker intuitions
suggest that the consonant actually belongs to both syllables at once.
For example, when asked to break up the word "happy" [haepi] into
syllables, many native speakers will hesitate between [hae.pi] and
[haep.i].  When asked to pronounce these words slowly, syllable
by syllable, they will often come up with [haep...pi], repeating the
consonant as both coda and onset.

Perhaps (he said, brandishing Occam's razor one final time) Amman
Iar has ambisyllabicity as well?  Perhaps the "n" in "erinis" is really
both syllable-final and syllable-initial?  Just a shot in the dark...

Matt.