Re: Stress and vowel length in Tirelat

Well, why not just leave it to be, as one of the greatest linguistic
mysteries and arguments for Tirelat-speakers? ;) Languages are fun because
they provide such a treasure trove of ends to pick and unpick.
Eugene

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:

> I figured out a way to get the stress on the last syllable of "Beijing" in
> Tirelat: give the word 3 syllables.
>
> Beiżiñ /be.i.'dziŋ/
>
> Not entirely unprecedented; I have "Zaiirvor" /za.'i:r.vOr/ "Democratic
> Republic of the Congo" for instance. But two vowels coming together like
> that is distinctly uncommon in Tirelat.
>
> In any case, I've been going back and examining stress and vowel length in
> Tirelat, one of the things that never had much of a satisfactory resolution.
> Currently, vowel length is represented in the writing system, although it's
> hard to find actual phonemic contrasts in the native vocabulary. One of the
> most likely examples, _marat_ "window" vs. _maraat_ "basket", could
> alternatively be treated as a distinction in stress: _márat_ vs. _marát_.
> There are lots of words with a single long vowel (_ugoołku_ "chameleon",
> _mutaa_ "no one", _šuuru_ "door"), which is always stressed, but no words
> with more than one long vowel (e.g., *laalii, *oomii).
>
> Besides long vowels, diphthongs and closed syllables ending in a voiced
> consonant also attract stress. E.g. ši'kaĭ "here", mi'zoĭ "finally", ġa'zar
> "deer", sa'nov "transitive verb". All of these could be grouped as "heavy"
> syllables. So are there any non-compound, native Tirelat words with more
> than one heavy syllable? Very few: _ñurmul_ "thunder" and _žaglam_ "vulture"
> are well established, but _ñurmul_ is clearly an onomatopoeia. There are
> also words like _terima_ "musical keyboard", _pereki_ "simultaneous",
> _neladak_ "agama lizard", and _vurupa_ "tomato", without any heavy
> syllables, which are stressed on the first syllable.
>
> So: with few exceptions, at most one syllable in a Tirelat word is heavy,
> and in the few cases where a word contains more than one heavy syllable, the
> stress falls on the first one. I still haven't found any clear cases of
> vowel length being distinctive.
>