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Re: [romconlang] Albionika, syllabification, stress, and sound changes



Deiniol Jones wrote:
Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
I think the syllabification might be seen as /al-bi-on-es/ and
/al-bi-on-i:-ka:/, and my instinct is to want to put the strongest
accent on the -on- in both cases, but despite puzzling over what I've
seen for the rules of Latin stress patterns (heavens only know what
Gaulish or Celtiberian stress patterns are; I think I'd better imagine
that my Albiones acquire Vulgar Latin style accent, regardless of what
they started with!), I'm not sure how to parse this.  And I could have
the syllabification wrong.

Well, as vowels in hiatus were rather rare I'd probably syllabify it as
/al.'bjo.ni:.ka:/, with stress on the antepenultimate.

I had though about syllabifying such that there was a -bjo- syllable, though I had read that in Latin (at least) that the letter written "i" has the sound /j/ sound only at the beginning of the words before a vowel or in the middle of the words between two vowels. Since the "i" in Albioni:ka: doesn't fit those conditions, I figured it must be in a seperate syllable than the "o" (at least if I go by Latin rules. Though, I suppose in any event it ought to later become a /j/ glide and be attracted into the syllable holding the /b/.

This is actually how I started thinking about the problem some while ago, and then I got hung up when /al.'bjo.ni:/ looked like it would turn into /al.bjue.ne/ and I couldn't figure out what to do with the cluster /bjue/, which doesn't look very Spanish. Still, perhaps some reduction of the diphthong would work (it was the dieos > dios posts that got me thinking about this again) so that /bjue/ > /bje/, perhaps? Someone on celticaconlang suggested metathesis so that "Albiones" > "Alboines", but I wasn't sure that would help me. It all seemed like setting up a lot of special cases to deal with, what is after all, the ethnic name of my group of speakers when they deserve a more regular development :)

This is why I wanted to go back and ask opinions on the syllabification and stress pattern .... Though I suppose if the "i" gets attracted to the /b/ as a /j/ in "Vulgar Albionika" anyway, then perhaps I have to figure out how to deal with /al.'bjo.ni:.ka:/ anyway. I couldn't think of many Latin words containing /'bjo/ to use as guides, though!


Primary stress
generally fell on the antepenult when possible in Gaulish, as is shown by
several French place-names. Linguists are pretty divided on the issue,
though, some saying that stress followed similar rules to Latin or that it
regularly fell on the penult; so do as you will.

Well, stress in the modern Romance languages tends towards the penult, no? So that might not be so bad a rule of thumb, though it might make it easier for me to apply Romance-style sound changes if I start with Latin-style stress ....

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
http://www.carlaz.com/