Re: Stress accent?

[raybrown@mailhost.atlas.co.uk (Raymond A. Brown)]

At 11:14 3/4/98, John Cowan wrote:
>I've been stressing the penult, on the assumption that Brithenig,
>like most Romance languages, shuns proparoxytones.

In fact Spanish has quite a lot of proparoxytones & they're not as
infrequent as is often supposed in Italian. The Spanish, however, do mark
them with an acute accent whereas the Italians leave them unmarked.

>Is that always
>right, though?  When does the ultima get the stress?

The development of Brithenig in fact resembles more closely French & Welsh
in that all post tonic syllables have tended to disappear.  This results in
stress regularly on the final syllable which is still the French norm; this
was also the rule in medieval Welsh (spelling makes this quite clear).  The
change to the modern Welsh habit of stressing the penult is a development
of the modern period - possibly BritEnglish influence which dislike final
stress.  I'd expect Brithenig to have developed final syllable stress like
French or medieval Welsh.  Whether it then followed modern Welsh & changed
to a penult syllable, I don't know.  We'll have to be informed by its
discoverer  ;-)  But personally, I rather hope not.

Rhaifun.

==========================================================
Written in Net English        Humor not necessarily marked

==========================================================