Pronunciation Questions

Michael McCafferty mmccaffe at indiana.edu
Wed Feb 21 13:42:58 UTC 2007


Quoting Doug Barr <lingoman at mac.com>:

> Hello, all -
>
> > 2. Secondary stress, especially in compound words: does stress simply
> proceed back every second syllable from the penultimate, or does the
> normally stressed syllable of each component other than the last
> receive secondary stress? For example, "nixochitemoa," "I seek
> flowers." Would that be - using capital letters for stressed
> syllables - NIxoChIteMOa with regular alternation of stressed and
> unstressed syllables, or niXOchiteMOa, putting secondary stress on
> the XO of XOchi(tl) as would be done if it were an independent word?
> I'm guessing the latter, since he says that there is a point of
> 'internal open transition' - i.e. slight but audible pause - between
> the constituents of a compound, which is sometimes recognized in the
> traditional spelling, but confirmation or denial would be helpful...

I have troulbe making perfect sense of much of Andrews, but 
"nixochitemoa" would be

niXOchiteMOa

but:

tictlazohtla

TICtlaZOHtla

quilnamiqui

QUILnaMIqui

nimitzilnamiquiz

NImitzILnaMIqui

Hmmmm...I'm sure Joe or Fran will have the answer. It looks like 
even-numbered syllables starting from the end, except with embeds, such 
as we see above with
xochitl.

Michael

I'm not sure of the rule, but if you want to toss me other examples, I 
can tell you where the "stress" falls. :-)





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