Stress marking (was: Re: CONLANG Digest - 14 Oct 2000 (maglangs plea!))

En réponse à Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...>:

>
> Well........
>
> In my Romance Lang, I use I for both /i/ and /j/. In front of another
> vowel, it's /j/:
>
> - io - /jo/ (yes, Italian inspired that orthographical bit).
>
Same with me: i (rarely y) is used for both /i/ and /j/: iou /ju/: I (funny,
again a resemblance in orthography :) ), ou for both /u/ and /w/: mouert /mwEr/:
death, and u for both /y/ and /H/: lui /lHi/: him (it happens to be identical
with French lui).

> But, if in between vowels, to differentiate it orthographically the
> preceding vowel is marked with an accent:
>
> - cúio - /kujo/. (of course here, the accent is on the u)
>
I've not yet found an example where i, ou or u would appear between two vowels
(for ou it wouldn't be a problem as it never makes a diphtong with the
preceeding vowel), but I think that if that happened I would certainly use the
trema ¨ to disambiguate (there's still to find out which letter would carry it
:) ).

>
> Otherwise in that example, it would have been /kwijo/. Now, i suppose
> problems may arrise if the accent isnt on the vowel marked with an
> accent,
> but I cant think of any examples.
>
In "Roumant", stress is a tricky point as it is only partly marked in
orthography. The regular rule is:
- when a word ends with a vowel or a *single* consonnant, stress is on the
penultimate *written* syllable.
- when a word ends *graphically* with two consonnants or more, stress is on the
last *written* syllable.
I insisted on "graphically" and "written" because like French, "Roumant"
orthography is regular but not phonetic, and there are lots of silent letters or
di- and tri-graphs.
But this rule doesn't work anymore when the word contains:
- one or more di- or trigraphs (I call them diphtongs because most of them
historically derive from the diphtongs of Latin, even if the term is incorrect
:) ).
- one or more accented letters (accents are the acute accent ´-which can appear
only on e or o-, the grave accent `-which can appear only on vowels of the last
written syllable of a word-, and the circonflex accent ^-which can appear only
on vowels of the non-last written syllables of a word. The tilde ~-which is
extremely rare but well settled on the few words where it's used- and the trema
¨ are also accents but are not considered when it comes to stress position).
Then normally the last diphtong or accented letter of the word is stressed, but
that's not always true. For instance, "cuêoucué" /'kEuke/: something is written
with two accented letters: ê and é, and a diphtong: ou. Yet it's not stressed on
the last of them (it would be /kEu'ke/) but on the first. And this is not an
isolated case.

Christophe.