Re: Stress accent?

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

At 18:29 14/4/98, Padraic Brown wrote:
>On Tue, 14 Apr 1998, Raymond A. Brown wrote:
>
>[multis snippitis]
>
>>
>> With respect, I feel both John & Padraic are looking at this through
>> English eyes and not Romance ones.  From the actual examples of French &
>> Romanian, I can see nothing at all unplausible or unlikely in:
>
>Yeah, that's right.  Now that I think about it, -n dissapears after
>accented vowels in the end of many Catala nouns: revelacio, nacio, Catala,
>etc.

I'd forgotten the Catalans dropping their final -n.

>My expertise is Castillian, and generic Spanish, where to my
>knowledge this loss _does not_ occur.  Other losses yes, but not -r (nor
>-n).

Yes, final -d I believe is lost in many varieties of Spanish.

>[Note that I understand that n and r are different, but both _are_
>vowels occuring in the same locations; with similar phenomena.]
>
>Sigh.  I guess we must be more careful!

Indeed. Final stress only ensures that the _vowel_ in the final syllable is
preserved & not weakened to [@] or some other 'unstressed' sound; it most
certainly does not ensures that final consonants are preserved.

Which means that the question of Brithenig stress is still unresolved.  I
think it all boils down to whether we believe the Romance nature of the
language was strong enough to preserve the stress in the Vulgar Latin
position which in the case of Brithenig, like modern French, would mean
word final stress, or whether Brithenig, like modern Welsh, would've been
affected by the British* English abhorrence for final stress and change to
the modern Welsh habit of stressing the penultimate.

[*Americans seem to have no problem, cf the different Brit. & American
pronunciations of 'cafe', 'debris', 'garage', 'buffet' etc. ]

[.....]
>> Sorry for delayed response.
>> I haven't been able to get through to my ISP since
>> 6th April   :=(
>
>Blimey!

Yep - not helped by the Easter break.  In Britain Good Friday is a public
holiday as is Easter Monday.  It meant that from Friday through to Monday
all I could contact when I phoned my ISP was an answer-phone!

Well, things seem OK now.  One problem, I think, is that the new-fangled
software I'm expected to use is just about taxing the memory of my ancient
machine.  That's being remedied  (today I hope) when a spanking new
Macintosh arrives with loads & loads of RAM and all the rest (and a rather
larger screen than I'm squinting at at the moment).

Ray.

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Written in Net English        Humor not necessarily marked

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