"Stress" (Was: kalabaw)

[Waruno Mahdi]

> I wish you had gone into technicalities. I have tried to find out how Malay
> is stressed but I lost hope because books do not agree with what I hear.

I had (and still have) two reasons for not going into the technicalities.

The simpler one is that I'm not a phonologist and hence would probably add
to the confusion rather then lessen it if I tried to into the details there.

The other reason is because, as already the length of your query aptly
demonstrates, an adequate answer (assuming I were phonolgist enough to
risk making one) would guarantee getting me kicked out of the mailing list
for overexerting all limits of mailer capacities.

There is the problem of nature of the stress, which is different depending
(a.o.!!) on which part of Indonesia or Malaysia the speaker comes from,
and for which I'd have to be a phonologist to even describe one of the
countless dialect varieties.

Then there's the problem of place of stress, which is likewise dependent
from where the speaker comes from, his social and ethnic background, etc.
But at least I can give some opinion as non-phonologist. In pronouncing
an isolated word, a Toba Batak speaking Indonesian Malay typically places
the stress on the penultimate, while a Javanese typically places it on the
ultimate, whereas the "standard", produced by well-trained school teachers
for Bahasa Indonesia or radio moderators, has what I described for "nuclear
Malay" (because it is ostentatively the way it is in "Mainland"-Riau,
that's the part of Riau on the island of Sumatra), i.e. on the ultimate if
the penultimate vowel is schwa, and otherwise on the penultimate. All other
dialects one could probably describe in terms of these three varieties,
i.e mostly ultimate, mostly penultimate, or sometimes the one somtimes the
other (I use "mostly" only to avoid being possibly confronted by exceptions
if I say "always").

That was for isolated words. The moment you have a sentence, then, again
depending on what part of the country you come from, there can be varyingly
strong suppression of word stress by sentence intonation, which can
involve shifting the main stress from ultimate to penultimate and vice
versa, splitting the stress in a main and secondary stress, not to mention
specific tonal modulation which can on one hand traverse a wide range of
tones in various melodious profiles, or also completely suppress tonality
and render part of the sentence a monotonous almost garbled string of
compressed syllables.

So strictly speaking, Indonesians are accustomed to the widest varieties
of stressing, and therefore quite lenient there, as long as you don't shift
the stress further to the front than the penultimate. So, to make clear
that you are a foreigner, just stress some words e.g. on the antepenultimate.
Luckily, there are no stress minimal pairs in Indonesian Malay, and the only
way to get  misunderstood is by applying a wrong sentence intonation, like
you mean to ask a question and the listener takes it to be a proposition.
But that's a mishap which can sometimes also happen between indigenous
speakers from different corners of the country (if that's any consolation).

Hope I haven't discouraged you from pressing on with your study :-)

Regards,   Waruno



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Waruno Mahdi                  tel:   +49 30 8413-5411
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Germany                       WWW:   http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/~wm/
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