Re: Romlang Experiment

--- In conlang@y..., "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@M...> wrote:

> Wouldn't it be the other way around? Stress is usually considered
> to be superimposed after any considerations of underlying length
> have been considered. (If the language is length sensitive, that is.
> Some languages do not have length sensitive stress systems.)
Good point.  I guess I should have spoken of heavy and light
syllables...  the stress falls on the first heavy syllable from the
right end of the word (max. third-to-last). Basically, a syllable is
considered heavy if it is terminated with a consonant, or contains a
diphtong or an accented vowel.

Vowel length is then assigned to the stressed syllable according to
whether the syllable is heavy or light.  So stress is really based on
syllable structure rather than vowel length.  Let's observe the
following imaginary words:

*tacona /ta:kAn@/
*tarcona /tarkAn@/
*tana /ta:n@/
*tarna /tarn@/

I can't tell whether such stressing is realistic, since I'm an amateur
in the field.

On second thought, /ta:kAn@/ doesn't seem to fit the general feeling I
got from this lang.  It seems to avoid two final unstressed syllables
at all costs.  Maybe I should switch to a fixed (except for accents)
penultimate syllable stressing.  I'd still have the silent final vowels
to mess it up with (e.g. afflictus -> aflictu /@"fliCt/).


> Wouldn't one likely see an epenthetic stop like that that actually
> showed up in romance languages? Ergo: genner, gendren, gendri, gendris...
Sounds plausible... though I wouldn't recognize the word "epenthetic"
outside of context.  As I said, I'm not a linguist.  =P


> > That's all I have so far... any comments?  (Apart from "it looks too
> > much like Germanech" ;-)
>
> Yeah, I like it. I like how you presented the diachronic changes,
> and those changes all seem reasonable.
Thanx!  Whatever diachronic means.  ;-)


-- Christian Thalmann