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On Apr 24, 2006, at 8:29 AM, Jim Henry wrote:
On 4/23/06, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote:rules. Currently, the rule is stress the first syllable. That may be the optimum way to do it. (And I shouldn't really be saying 'words', but 'morphemes').Are morphemes stressed the same independently of whether they stand alone or are in a compound word?
As I see it, yes and no. With a compound of 2 1-syllable morphs, likegayrdom, the stress is on the first syllable, but since neither morph had any stress to begin with, it's not a problem . It only comes into question when you have longer morphs to begin with. Say, "pami cir" mother milk. That would be PA-mi CIR. But as a compound, pamicir, it would be pronounced PA- mi-cir, I think. Now, if you had a compound like fayrcari, It would have primary stress on the first, and secondary on the 'ca'. But as two words it would have (I think) primary stress on the fayr and the ca. Likewise, pamicari would have primary on the pa and secondary on the ca. So that's how I see stress indicating compounds
in Tceqli.
I've also considered penultimate stress, which works okay, and having stress fall on the last syllable that doesn't end in a vowel. I wonder if my propensities are confusing me. A word like 'kanor' seems like it should be stressed on the last syllable, no matter the rule. And a word like 'himel', seems to need stress on the first syllable. Am I reacting to some intrinsic linguistic tendency here, or am I just exporting my own prejudices.I don't have any problem with /'ka.nor/; it seems as good as /ka.'nor/if not better, so I don't think it can be a strong intrinsic tendency if ittwo native speakers of the same language can differ in their inclination so.If the former, perhaps Tceqli should have slightly more complicated stress rules.This is probably a bad idea. Auxlangs should have a simple stress rule; of the ones I've tried, first syllable and penultimate syllable seem more euphonious than last syllable. Though maybe better still is to have even stress as in Japanese, or design the language so that speakers can stress whatever syllables they like and still be understandable -- I think your self-segregation rule for Tceqli probably accomplishes that, but we would need face-to-face conversational testing to be sure.
Good. I was hoping that would be the concensus. Rex May rmay@hidden.email See some of my cartoons at: http://homepage.mac.com/rmay/ NOW UPDATED REGULARLY!