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Re: "Double stressed" words

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Thursday, August 28, 2003, 16:15
Most natlangs which have stress recognize "primary" and "secondary"
stress for long words.  For example, the English word "philosophically"
has primary stress on the "so" and secondary stress on the "phi":
/,fI.l@'sA.f@.k@.li/.  I don't know of any natlangs that have identical
stress in more than one syllable, but not all syllables, within a single
"word", but I would not be surprised to learn of their existence. :)

> I think I've seen something alike to this in Tolkien's work > (IIRC, "N�men�rean").
No, the accute accent mark in Tolkien's transcription of the Elvish languages is just a long vowel marker, not a stress marker. Quenya follows the Latin rule of the penult, so the stressed syllable in "N�men�rean" is the "�". And it does happen that the "�" gets the secondary stress. But in both cases that is not because of the accent mark; it's because of the position of the syllable. Vowel length affects the determination of stress (if it were "N�men�r�an", with a long "e", then the accent would fall on that long e), but it's not as simple as "long vowels get the stress". And Quenya words have only one primarily-stressed syllable. -Mark

Replies

Tristan McLeay <zsau@...>
Estel Telcontar <estel_telcontar@...>