Pronunciation Questions

[Matthew Montchalin]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Michael McCafferty wrote:
| 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 -

Wait!

I prefer to use *uppercase* letters to mark syllables whose
quantities are long, rather than syllables bearing primary or
secondary stress.  Words in Nawatl take on different senses
depending on whether they have long or short vowels.  The
same thing can't be said of words whose sole differences
are the locations of their syllabic stress.

For that reason, it is far more important to dwell on the matter
of vocalic length than syllabic stress.

| > 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?

Similarly, how are we to distinguish a prefix from a preposition,
and count one as an integral part of a word, and the other an
infix?  If you are familiar with modern German (and it helps if
you have studied a little Old German), a "separable prefix" is
nearly the same thing as a preposition (or even a postposition in
certain instances), so it quickly becomes problematical counting
these syllables as separate and independent words as opposed to
infixes that are separable in the same way that they are found
in modern German.

| > 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...

Say, do you think that this kind of a 'pause' is more along the
lines of the caesura in Classical Latin poetry, and would therefore
be more a matter of syllabic quantity than syllabic stress?

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

I really think uppercase vowels should be used for long vowels,
as opposed to stressed vowels.

_______________________________________________
Nahuatl mailing list
Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl