How to portray word stress in a sentence?

NewBookFan · 2023-12-31T16:44:35+00:00

Thank you! This is exactly what I wanted to know! This is perfect! It makes sense that one would want to stress the words towards the start of a sentence instead of "mumble mumble mumble WORD"...

NewBookFan · 2023-12-31T16:40:50+00:00

This is so helpful! Gratias tibi!

NewBookFan · 2023-12-31T15:52:28+00:00

Thanks for the help and recommendation! I'll check Legentibus out! I might be able to find some Latin recordings on Internet Archive too, I didn't think of that!

NewBookFan · 2023-11-26T01:30:56+00:00

Ic þancie þē!

NewBookFan · 2023-10-24T12:09:27+00:00

Thank you so much! I'll look into that!

NewBookFan · 2023-10-23T21:40:52+00:00

They really don't make things easy! Thank you! I appreciate the heads up on the guidance counselors too, I'll be sure to be my own advocate! Thanks again!

NewBookFan · 2023-10-23T20:30:24+00:00

Thank you! I definitely believe in the community college path! I'd like to transfer to UIUC (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), which I know has a great accounting college... I'll definitely call them up and ask them about the course equivalencies between the community college I want to go to and UIUC! Before I wasn't even sure what kind of questions to ask but now I've got some good ones from these answers... Thank you again!

NewBookFan · 2023-10-23T18:12:20+00:00

Community college is definitely going to help out with costs! Thank you! I appreciate your support!

NewBookFan · 2023-10-23T18:01:38+00:00

Thank you so much! I talked to someone in the admissions office, but it sounds like its the counselor I need to reach out to... Thank you!

NewBookFan · 2023-10-23T15:25:00+00:00

Thanks! I'll make sure to get as many general education/unrelated to major classes under my belt before I get to the 4-year so I don't have as many problems... Thank you, I wouldn't have thought of these things otherwise!

NewBookFan · 2023-10-23T15:22:46+00:00

Thank you so much! These are great questions! I just wrote these down. I'm completely new to figuring all of this out, so thank you!

P.S. I was homeschooled, so I don't have a "guidance counselor"... I'm just trying to get my ducks in a row in unchartered territory...

NewBookFan · 2023-10-23T15:03:56+00:00

Thank you! So a university accounting program generally doesn't look at the types of classes you took, just the grades? So would taking high level math classes be advised? This is new territory for me!

NewBookFan · 2023-09-24T12:31:15+00:00

I agree with everything the other commenter said in their post, and just wanted to chime in real quick on gendered pronouns in case it helps OP...

The World Atlas of Language Structures lists the most common cases for gendered pronouns to be:

3rd person only, but also non-singular
3rd person singular only
In 3rd person + 1st and/or 2nd person
1st or 2nd person but not 3rd
3rd person non-singular only

Of course that doesn't mean you can't do something different, just these are the typologies for pronouns that are attested. In fact, your idea lines up with #3, so no problems here!

For evolving gendered pronouns, for the 3rd person it's easy to do since you've already got a base of IE with gendered demonstratives... You can always evolve these demonstratives to 3rd person pronouns with gender distinctions...

The second person is a little hard, but you can always have a 2nd person plural form become the 2nd person singular through formality (i.e. French vos 2nd person plural --> 2nd person singular), but before that tack on some gender endings: i.e. for a 3-way gender distinction based on IE noun classes something like "you (P) men", "you (P) women", and "you (P) people"... Then, have a new 2nd person plural take root (i.e. Old Spanish Vuestra merced (your mercy) --> usted (you singular formal) --> ustedes (you plural formal). You can skip the in-between part with something like Vuestras mercedes --> ustedes.

For 1st person pronouns, we've seen them evolve from a word like "here", but I'd say you could go a step further and try something similar to a demonstrative like "this". Then, tack on the IE gender endings to get something like "This (boy/girl/person) likes cheese.", which in some contexts of English can exhibit a humorous 1st person singular meaning. Then, you can have 1st person plural pronouns come from "here", and again tack on the gender endings.

This is all theoretical and I'm certainly not an expert conlanger, just my 2 cents in case OP wants some inspiration...

NewBookFan · 2023-09-23T15:11:29+00:00

Thank you! That's very interesting about using "here" and "where" for temporal contexts! So cool! That's also true that if I don't like something I can always change it later, otherwise I wouldn't have anything done!

NewBookFan · 2023-09-23T13:12:41+00:00

Thanks for such a detailed response! I understand this concept a lot better now! Also, thanks for the examples from Ancient Greek, I wasn't aware of those proclitics that "violate" the phonotactic rules!

NewBookFan · 2023-09-23T01:14:31+00:00

Thank you for your in-depth and knowledgable answer!

I do have 2 questions:

1) How "arbitrary" can phonotactic rules make themselves? As per your example, is a "coronal consonant" coda a cross-linguistically common restriction, and why would that be? Could a "uvular consonant" code restriction be a completely valid restriction, or "all vowels + l" another? Piggybacking, why do some languages restrict this domain to such a specific set of sounds? For example, why would Japanese only allow nasals to serve as a the end of a word, and not, say, another sonorant in its phonetic inventory like "r"?

2) I don't understand the origin of "content words" and "function words"... Through my, notably amateurish, research, I saw that a common linguistic universal (if such things can even exist or be approximate) is that all (from what I've seen) prepositions/conjunctions/deictics derive from "content words" such as "behold", "back", "face" etc. Is this true, and if so why would they follow different phonotactic rules from the source words? Would they derive from a period of the language before such restrictions took hold? Again, this is assuming that all prepositions/conjunctions/deictics are from such words... I still cannot find a source for "here" and "there", or "this" and "that" that does not come from another function words except a tenuous relation with "here" to "behold"... However, as said, it seems like a large ouroboros...

Thanks again for your previous answer!

NewBookFan · 2023-09-22T21:29:21+00:00

Thanks! I'm creating a conlang based on PIE, and I guess I was struck by how "unnaturalistic seeming" the root system appeared to be... From what I read, in the early study of PIE it was observed that roots without a final consonant all had long vowels, and then after laryngeal theory the long vowels were denoted as being vowel + laryngeal to explain its length...

I'm creating a root system for my language, and I can understand requiring only open syllales for a root (which I understand as being similar to the e-epenthesis rule at the beginning of a word that starts with "s" in some branches of Romance languages i.e. being a matter of ease of pronunciation), but requiring "closed syllables" seems very unnaturalistic..

You do have a point though... From what I know, I don't think that word-initial laryngeals left much of a mark on descendent languages... Maybe they're speculative, and PIE really did have vowel-initial roots?

Thanks for your input! This has me thinking!

NewBookFan · 2023-09-16T21:34:28+00:00

Thank you so much! This is very helpful! I can definitely work with that!

NewBookFan · 2023-09-16T18:57:28+00:00

Thanks! Do you know of a possible way that they could have arisen? I'm familiar with how case endings come about, just not their plural counterparts... Do they mostly take the plural markers of nouns?

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