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Rex May - Baloo wrote: > > on 2/28/02 1:34 AM, Mike Wright at darwin@hidden.email wrote: > > Yikes! I do need to give this a lot more thought. My knee-jerk > pronunciations below: Tricky, isn't it? > > What about the following? > > > > gasulgater > > ga sul' ga ter" > > > > daryakinar > > dar" ya ki' nor > > > > pampamzo > > pam pam' zo by the conscious penultimate stress rule > > > > popyatertail > > po' pya ter" tail > > > > silamkreipe > > si' lam krei" pe > > > > > And what how do you define a syllable? Is <koijai> four syllables, as > > it would be in Japanese? > > The list you got these from was formed under the ai, ei, oi, au, eu makes a > diphthong rule. Therefore koijai is 2 syllables. > > > > Would you break up <karalan>, <karaqan>, and <karaman> the same way? > > If so, how? If not, why not? > > Yes, ka-RA-lan, etc. > > > > > Frankly, it takes a lot of staring for me to figure out which groups > > of syllables belong together in a morpheme, even though I understand > > the rule. I find it odd that stress should involve knowing what is and > > what is not a morpheme. > > Well, here's my thinking on that. Did I already say this? Oh, well. > > GER-man combines with pe to make GER-man-pe. You have to keep the internal > stress of the morph lest you twist it out of shape, as in ger-MAN-pe. > > Now, I have a problem with ga and pi compounds. I realize that I want to > say ga-TER instead of GA-ter. I think this is because the Ter is the most > important part of the compound and I want to stress it. A way around this > would be to make ga and pi suffixes. Terga. What do you think? I did the > same thing some time ago when I moved zo and xi from prefixes to suffixes, > for the same reason. I'd stick to a single form throughout, either modifier-head or head-modifier, but mixing them up will be strange. I feel that consistency is very important to ease of learning and understanding. I certainly wouldn't change the syntax just to make the phonology easier. My own feeling is that stress should generally ignore morphemes within compounds. This is the way Mandarin and Hokkien work. And it frees the user from having to think about morphemes and talk at the same time. Until you have native speakers, I don't think many people will be able to do it naturally. -- Mike Wright http://www.CoastalFog.net _______________________________________________________ "When they wired us humans up, they really should have labeled the wires--don't you think?" -- Ed