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Further thought on stress pattern to mark compound words: Here's a really easy pattern that seems natural. For multisyllabic words (undisirregardless of whether they are compounds), the tone profile drops in the first syllable and climbs back up in the last. pampamxi: p i a x mpam kompan: k m o a mp tari: t i ar It's not as marked as these diagrams suggest. And it's not mandatory; as with most stuff in Ceqli, it's there if you need it for clarity. But I can imagine training students from the outset to use this stress/tone profile, just as in Russian class we were encouraged to use low stress rather than the high stress of English. So the normal pronunciation of "gape" would be distinct from "ga pe"; the speaker wouldn't have to remember to make a special point of distinguishing them, as we sometimes do when we want to distinguish between "bluebird" and "blue bird" (where we pause, realize we may be confusing someone, back up, and try to clarify with emphasized verbal and visual cues). The fact that "tari" would follow the same stress/tone profile, even though it's a single morpheme, would, to me, be an attractive simplification. [I think the reason I'm so hung up on this topic is that I am frequently confused, and confuse others, in English this way. I tend to speak slowly, so when I say "bluebird", it's apparently not fast enough for some people to put the morphemes together as a single word.] ---larry