Ukrainian stress

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Daniel Rancour-Laferriere wrote:

> Dear Paul,
> I don't recall who performed that song, but I can hear it in my head,  
> and I hear a distinct word stress on that last syllable - "garDEN."   
> And when I sing it aloud the stress is there too.

Perhaps in your imagination that is so; in my imagination the stress is 
on the first syllable. I can't offer objective measurements.

> As I look at your notation, I see that we may have different ideas of  
> what a "foot" is. Do you perhaps have in mind "measure" instead of  
> "foot?"  

As I understand it, a "foot" is one stressed syllable plus whatever 
unstressed syllables it takes to get to the adjacent stressed syllable. 
In some poetry, the unstressed syllables occur before the stress, in 
some they occur afterward. The definition is similar to that of a 
"wavelength" -- the distance from crest to crest.

In most Western musical notation, the assumption is that the stress 
begins a foot (ONE and | TWO and | THREE and...), but much of our poetry 
is iambic (and ONE | and TWO | and THREE...), so songwriters must go to 
some trouble to align their poetic stresses with the musical ones. In 
the case at hand, for example, Joe South skips the first beat and begins 
with a pickup, putting his first metrical stress ("nev-") on the musical 
second beat. It's more common to align the first stresses of both, but 
then we would get "I NEVer prómised YOU a róse GARden" instead of "I 
néver PROMised yóu a ROSE gárden" (using CAPS for the strongest 
stresses). To my ear, the latter version supports the poetic meter as 
well as the logic of the line, while the former one resists them.

> ... In any case, Will Ryan has offered more examples, and the stress
> shifts there are very deliberate.

I haven't seen these -- were they posted on SEELANGS?

> ... But note that they are all at the end of the line. This is like
> Russian, where there is a requirement that the final ictus be
> fulfilled (the "law of the end of the line" - James Bailey). It
> seems, then, that in English as in Russian, the law of the end of the
> line trumps even phonemic stress placement. But in Russian I have
> found this happening elsewhere than in the final foot as well (there
> are many complications).
> 
> Once upon a time I worked out this and related metrical issues in
> great detail (please see various items on the web site). I do
> remember that the 20 native speakers in one study each grew
> increasingly grumpy as we moved through the 28 poetry selections
> where in half the cases a pronunciation choice HAD to be made between
> violating word stress or violating the metrical rhythm. 

I can imagine; I myself dislike poetry with the accént on the wrong 
sylláble and consistently rate songs with such mismatches lower than 
songs without them. For that matter, I dislike figure skating routines 
where the skater's moves are off-beat and the music seems to be 
incidental background instead of an integrated partner.

> ... And it is curious that the three published poets (Sasha Sokolov,
> Aleksei Tsvetkov, Eduard Limonov) shifted word stress significantly
> more often than did the rest of the sample (p less than .025 on 
> Mann-Whitney U test).
> 
> All of which illustrates Roman Jakobson's 1923 thesis that poetic
> form is "organized violence" inflicted upon language.
> 
> Cheers to the list.
> 
> <http://Rancour-Laferriere.com>

I'm sure I will find your site interesting, but I have a deadline today 
(my nephew's birthday party 160 miles away), so it will have to wait.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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