Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Justifying a stress pattern

From:Dirk Elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
Date:Saturday, December 29, 2007, 17:17
Andreas:

It seems to be a perfectly reasonable stress pattern. In most versions of
stress theory, the final consonant or syllable *can* be ignored (or rendered
"extrametrical" to use the technical term) for the purposes of reckoning
stress. You mentioned Latin -- Latin is a good example of final syllable
extrametricality: its description is something like "Stress the penult if it
is heavy; else stress the antepenult." Notice that the final syllable never
comes into it. In your system, the word-final *consonant* is rendered
extrametrical; it doesn't count to make a syllable heavy. Palestinian Arabic
also has this feature. So you can paraphrase your description as: "Stress
the rightmost heavy syllable, given final consonant extrametricality (where
a heavy syllable is a syllable containing a long vowel or diphthong, or one
which is closed by a coda). If there is no heavy syllable, stress the
initial syllable."

Dirk

On Dec 29, 2007 8:17 AM, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

> One project of mine that has never progressed much beyond the naming > language > stage is Keshean (Kesheâras). One particularity it has is a system of > stress > placement that seemed to make sense at the time but now strikes me as odd. > Now, > certain real-world languages feature stress patterns that alo strike me as > odd, > but can be explained, or at least compactly described, by moraic theory or > the > like - eg. Latin, where stress falls on the second-to-last mora, ignoring > the > final syllable. Perhaps someone can think of a similar compact description > for > Kesheah stress. The noncompact description might be stated like this: > > i) The stress goes on the last syllable if that contains a long vowel (or > diphthong) or ends in a consonant cluster. > ii) Failing that, the next long syllable to the left. > iii) If all nonfinal syllables are short, stress goes on the first > syllable. > > Some examples (colon marks long vowel, accent stress): > élshas > elshá: > elshaís > aréts > áreda > áredikas > stra:gá:nas > reáxtanas > > ('sh'=/S/, the rest more or less = IPA) > > The oddity, of course, is that a long final syllable doesn't attract the > stress > if it ends in a short vowel followed by a single consonant. The > description > would be simplified if the final consonant, if any, of each word were > ignored - > the stress rule would then be stress on the rightmost long syllable, or on > the > leftmost in the absence of long syllables - but that seems very arbitrary. > > Suggestions? Comments? > > Andreas >

Reply

Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>