Comments on the Draft Great Vowel & Stress Proposal
My answers and comments thus.
1.
I imagine some of these recommendations will be a little frustrating, but I’ve tried
to restrain myself. For example, I’ve dropped my ideas about retaining fossilised accents
in affixes like ûn- and -oûr and my suggestion about retaining the old preference for
stress on ü and ö. Even though I voted against Proposal 1 (the Overarching Proposal),
I’ve tried to use its tenets as my guiding principles in drafting these comments. My goal
is to identify the changes to Talossan vowels and stress that reasonable serve the needs
identified by the Overarching Proposal, and avoid going beyond that unnecessarily – at
least at this point. As a wise man once said, “It's important that we do things right, and
not rush into making changes that will turn out later to be just as wrong as the thing we
were trying to fix.”
I. VOWELS AND VOCALICS
2.
Consider using some phonemic transcription in the document. I was initially
confused by the statement in the second paragraph that each diphthong contains "i or u"
as an on-glide or off-glide, combined with the appearance of oa (which doesn't have i or
u) in the table of polyphthongs at page 5.
Good point. I don’t think this document is printer-ready, and any suggestions (like this)
that make it easier to understand are welcome.
Alternatively (or additionally), consider making the vowel representations more
consistent by respelling all occurrences of the ua diphthong as ua (instead of having
some as ua and some as oa). Then some of the apostrophes and diacritics in the list on
page 13 become unneccessary, because you wouldn't have to spell /oa/ some other way
than oa. The same goes for ae and ai (although see paragraph 15 below). I don’t feel
strongly about this (indeed, it would result in more spelling changes than I would like),
I’m just submitting the idea for your consideration.
I don’t think I want to make those changes; certainly not just yet.
3.
In the table of monophthongs, I oppose the “anything goes” approach to the acute
and grave accents. We should preserve the traditional rule that grave accents are used on
final vowels (including single-letter words), and acute accents are used everywhere else.
This should at least be the default rule (I have no problem saying it’s acceptable to do
otherwise), and should be followed in the examples given in the CÚG’s reference
materials. For example, at the top of page 7, á should be à and lá should be là, and the
last word in the document should be solo’istà rather than solo’istá. One exception to this
rule is the word tú, which always has an acute accent.
I’d rather leave it that acute and grave accents are exactly equivalent in all instances.
Less to learn, less to worry about.
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Why would tú be an exception?
4.
I think the change proposed by specifying that final unstressed e and i are "silent
(or very nearly so)" is unnecessary. This complicates Talossan pronunciation rules (by
introducing an extra rule for the pronunciation of each letter that didn't exist before)
rather than simplifying them, and doesn't seem necessary to accomplish the goals of
regularising stress and accents. Recognising that these letters are unstressed is good
enough for now. This document doesn't need to get into the phonetic detail of analysing
precisely how much more unstressed e and i become than a, o, or u.
Actually, this was an attempt to simplify (or at least regularise) the rules. We already
have various endings in -i (like -etzi and -schti) where the i is silent; I think these aren’t
isolated cases, but examples of the general rule in Talossan.
5.
In the diphthongs table, the section on iv talks about i and j being interchangeable
in these diphthongs. I think that’s going a bit too far, as it requires respelling a great
majority of the Talossan words with j, because the great majority have j in the
combination cj (or scj). Thus point 8 of the “how to get there from here” section requires
respelling all words with cj. I would much prefer to simply specify that a C is always
hard next to j. In fact, cjv so greatly outnumbers chiv that I would much rather change
all occurrences of chiv (9) to cjv (146) than the reverse. Then chi would basically only
be necessary to make c hard when followed by i as a monophthong. Consider this, also:
If we respell all the cj words, that only leaves about 40 words with j. And about half of
those are liable to be respelled under Proposal 2 (foreign imports) or to be supplanted by
a more Romance word (why smiðjâ for “blacksmith’s shop” when we have furxhéir?).
Did we “save” j through Proposal 3.11 only to get rid of 90% of its occurrences
anyways? Keeping cj gives j a clear niche.
I disagree. J and I should be entirely equivalent. That’s an EASY rule to remember. To
have them equivalent except when after c and before a vowel isn’t easy. Providing j with
a “clear niche” is to complicate things unnecessarily – or rather, to fail to simplify.
6.
Regarding placement of stress marks in diphthongs, it might be useful to
explicitly point out the hierarchy of vowels, because if readers miss the pattern they
might feel like each combination has to be memorized, especially since if “one of the two
vowels is stressmarked, but it’s NOT the one that forms the stressmarked version of the
diphthong (for instance, aí or éu),” then the vowels do not form a diphthong. The vowels
can be ordered a, o, u, e, i. Whichever two vowels are put together in a diphthong, the
one that comes first on that list gets the stress mark.
Good observation, and yes, this should be added to the document when we publish the
Arestada.
II. STRESS
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7.
I suggest including examples with more syllables for people who are unfamiliar
with words like penult and antepenult. Right now all the examples could be interpreted
as showing either word-initial stress or word-final stress.
Yes, good suggestion.
8.
I see a minor problem with the default stress rule (which, put most simply, is
“stress the vocalic before the last consonant in the word”). In the past, the bare-bones
version of the default stress rule was “stress the penultimate syllable.” The new version
recognises that many Talossan words have dropped their final vowels, making the
stressed syllable final rather than penultimate. However, I don’t think this rule
adequately accounts for words with multiple syllables after the final consonant in the
word. For example, oroiâ (wetland) – the default rule tells us that the initial o should be
stressed, which doesn’t feel right to me. Theoretically, we could have polysyllabic words
with no vocalic before the last consonant, like zoaeae (a crustacean larval stage). That
word would have to be marked for stress under the rule as written, otherwise there’d be
no way to pronounce it.
I don’t see any reasonable way to handle this (very small) group of words by rule. Why
not just always mark their stress? That’s not much of a burden.
9.
Two suffixes that are in the list of unstressed suffixes in the current rules but not
in the list in the GV&SP basic stress rule are -üm and -üs. It appears to me that the great
majority of these words should be stressed somewhere other than the final syllable.
Should these suffixes be added to the “always unstressed unless stressmarked” list?
Look, this is a suggestion from me that results in a reduction of diacritics.
I disagree. Ben (or someone) wrote, in an attempt at codifying stress:
If the word contains only one accented vowel then it is stressed, excepting the
endings -â, -âs, -escù, -ìci, -mînt, -päts, -phäts and the prefixes în-, ûn-.
If a word contains two or more accented vowels it is usually the last one which is
stressed, excepting the endings -â, -âs, -escù, -ìci, -mînt, -päts, -phäts, -üm, -üs.
I conclude that Ben did not consider words in -üm and -üs generally to have last-syllable
stress.
10.
I recommend dropping the section on secondary stress. This is the section of the
document that will look most confusing to new learners, (“2B, B3, 1B – I have to do
algebra to know how to pronounce Talossan words?”), and I don’t think it adds that
much value for three main reasons.
Well, the value it DOES add it to provide a complete mapping from writing to
pronunciation, which will be incomplete if we leave this section out. I grant that it’s kind
of complex. Maybe we should put something in there telling the student that this is a
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section he can probably skip over without memorising, since the words affected by it are
kind of rare.
First, being aware of these secondary stress rules will likely cause learners to
pause and overanalyse long words instead of just saying them. Getting the hang of
primary stress will be pretty simple, while getting the hang of secondary stress will
require determining primary stress, then determining whether the syllable with primary
stress is where you start counting from, then counting syllables (sometimes repeating that
whole process multiple times, as in the example of “AU þor i SA ZIUN”).
Second, secondary stress has never been addressed in Talossan before, and I’m
afraid we may be getting over our heads in trying to authoritatively state what the rules
are. To really deal adequately with multiple levels of lexical stress, we would also have
to establish the rules for prosody in Talossan. Even in well-known languages like
Spanish and English the rules for secondary stress (and even whether secondary stress is
a meaningful concept at all) are somewhat controversial among linguistics. Moreover,
the literature I’ve seen suggests that even native speakers’ perceptions of where
secondary stress falls in ordinary speech (as opposed to pronouncing words in isolation)
are not terribly reliable.
These aren’t rules for prosody or stress in the language, but rules on how to go from the
actual language to the writing system and back. I don’t suggest any rules on how
Talossan works, just on how to WRITE Talossan.
Third, I believe this Arestadâ should focus as much as possible on orthography
(although we’ve departed from that principle a little bit already). Secondary stress
(unlike primary stress) does not affect how words are written, so I think it unnecessary to
authoritatively address that issue in this Arestadâ. I do think, however, that this would be
a great topic for, say, a short paper in La Revischtâ: El Xhurnál dal CÚG.
III. EXCEPTIONS
11.
So should be pronounced /su/ per SG and Sir Tomás’s pronoun table.
Yes, you’re right.
12.
The numbers thirty, forty, fifty, etc., are pronounced irregularly and should be
added to this list.
They’re a mess, aren’t they? Yes, I suppose they should be added. 40 and 70 anyway
should be. (The others look reasonably regular, don’t they?) Seifet (seven) is
pronounced as if it were sáifet, too; maybe it should get a stressmark at least. I really
don’t know how 50 is supposed to be pronounced, either.
Maybe, since qator relaced ceatháir for 4, we should replace cearéinçe for 40. Qatreinçe
anyone?
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IV. HOW TO GET THERE FROM HERE
13.
Number 1 says “Replace all instances of â and å with a.” At one point I was
going to propose keeping the final â on an optional basis, it being such an ubiquitous
feature of Talossan. But that would create a potential for confusion with the stressmarked form of ä. Still, I think it would be nice to say something like: “In the past, final
unstressed a in feminine words was often marked with a breve (ǎ). This is still
occasionally seen in flowery or pedantic writing.” A-breve came before a-circumflex,
and was replaced only because ǎ is harder to generate on a computer. This would create
the tiniest opening for those who still want to pretty up their writing with gratuitous
diacritics to do so, without causing confusion or making anyone feel in the slightest way
obligated to do so.
I deprecate prettying up.
Also, when we get around to writing a new grammar, we will also have to keep in
mind that this change increases the irregularity of grammatical gender in Talossan – there
will no longer be a distinction between feminine nouns ending in â and masculine nouns
ending in a, so the latter will all become irregular. Similarly, there will no longer be a
distinction between the feminine form of many adjectives and the invariable adjectives
that end in a. At some point we should create a list of all words with irregular gender (I
don’t think it has to be part of this Arestadâ). See paragraph 16 below for another
suggestion about a specific pair of words with â and å.
I agree.
14.
Number 2 says “Replace all instances of äi with ai.” Why? Nothing in sections I
through III would seem to require this change. If it’s solely due to perceived difficulty of
pronunciation (I personally don’t see a problem with it, and neither would Aussies, Finns,
or Norwegians), perhaps my proposal in the next paragraph would help here as well.
Yes, I think äi is hard to pronounce, and it certainly doesn’t strike me as very natural for a
Romance language. Nuke it I say.
15.
Number 3 calls for respelling words ending in –är or –ärC. I have a suggestion
which would not require any respelling of these words. In most languages that have ä
(German, Swedish, Estonian, Slovak), the pronunciation thereof varies between [æ] and
[ε]. The same goes for æ in Norwegian and Danish (both æ and ä developed from a
ligature of a and e, and both have historically been used for the same purpose in
Norwegian and Danish, although æ is standard now). This is understandable because
phonetically, [æ] and [ε] both fall in between [a] and [e]. When ä is difficult to
pronounce as [æ], then, I think the most natural solution is to turn to [ε] as a regular
allophone (or a permissible allophone). Given the existence of words like bär (berry),
ärör (error), and Tärtuglhán (Tertullian), I really suspect that this is what Ben was
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actually doing without realising it, just like in German. I don’t think Tartuglhán makes
as much sense. I think this approach would also be more consistent with the actual
history of Latin æ, which by Late Latin had devolved from [ai] to [ε] (although I realise
that few instances of Talossan ä actually derive from Latin æ).
So you’re proposing a pronunciation rule that ä is pronounced like e before r? That
strikes me as pretty reasonable, and I’d be willing to modify my proposal if people would
rather go that way than respell those words.
Here’s a somewhat more extreme idea which bridges the gap between what I
propose above and what number 3 proposes for words ending in är: maybe we should
just allow æ as an alternative form of ä, just as we had talked about making ø an
alternative form of ö (and Sir Tomás preferred ø)? Some might find that more Romancefeeling, since æ appears in Latin and French. If we did that, in fact, it might make sense
for the some of the 10 words that currently have ae to be spelled with ä/æ instead. Not
the aero- words, because those are modern borrowings of a Greek root (and should
probably be spelled airo- on Proposal 2 grounds), but maybe the others. Then you could
remove ae from the polyphthong table and half of the problem that I describe in
paragraph 2 above goes away.
I resist introducing yet another weird low-use letter into Talossan.
16.
Number 4 (remove silent –ë) will require changing some nouns other than pëvarë,
such as säpfaçarë (know-how) and benestarë (welfare, well-being).
Yes, good catch.
I also recommend changing së to sè to distinguish it from the word se that already exists,
following the precedent of words such as à, là, and tù. I would also change sâ to sà to
distinguish from så (which will become sa), or vice-versa.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this in recent weeks, and I really don’t think we need to
distinguish AT ALL in writing between these homophonic word-pairs. I’d (in fact) be in
favour of knocking the accent off à, là, and tù, before I’d want to start splattering accents
around other words that don’t need them.
This also relates to number 15, which calls for going through the lexicon and
removing “unnecessary stressmarks.” Like the original set of “modest proposals” said,
“even though there’s no need to mark the stress on a one-syllable word, a stress mark is
still used on some one-syllable words to avoid confusion with other words pronounced
and otherwise spelled the same.” The current GV&SP draft is less clear on this issue. I
would say that a stressmark is not “unnecessary” when it disambiguates two
homophones. I don’t propose going through the lexicon to add accents to existing
monosyllabic homophones, but in the case of se/së and så/sâ at least one of the pair is
already accented – we’d just be switching the accent to one that makes more sense.
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Also, I would be conservative about removing stressmarks from monosyllabic
words even if those words do not presently have a non-stressmarked counterpart. First,
such words are often very basic and very recognizable, and in many cases the stressmarks
should probably be retained on historical grounds (especially since they are incapable of
causing any confusion anyways). Second, a non-stressmarked homophone may be
created in the future, automatically creating a la/là relationship between the old word and
the new word. Third, some of these monosyllables are homophones already, and instead
of removing the accent completely, we could remove the accent from one sense and leave
it on the other, thereby disambiguating the homophones in writing. Examples include tú
(subject pronoun, possessive pronoun, and possessive adjective – which could be
disambiguated just like in Spanish), fà (musical note, griddle), pù (digging stick, pine
nut), pál (gunshot, pawl), and tôn>tón (see paragraph 21 below – musical accent, tone,
English ton),
Spanish, and every other language I can think of, has lots of pairs of words
undistinguished in spelling. Why make the Talossan student memorise WHICH noun –
the digging stick or the pine nut – has an accent mark? Needless effort.
17.
Number 5 calls for generally replacing ï with í. I would merely add a caveat that
in some cases an apostrophe might be preferable, when it appears that the ï should not be
stressed. Maybe there are no such cases, though.
I haven’t found any, but I’m not certain they don’t exist.
18.
Number 7 deals with î. I have a big problem with this section, because it’s not
really about vowel accents and stress, or about orthography. It’s about phonology and
etymology, and the proposed changes would, in my opinion, remove a very interesting
feature of the language (and not just of how the language is written).
Talossan î is inspired by Romanian î/â – not just in the sound or the orthographic
representation, but also how it behaves. Just like in Talossan, the Romanian sound has
multiple representations (currently î or â, but in the past ê and û were used as well). Just
like in Talossan, that one sound represents multiple sounds in the original Latin words (as
the multiple ways of spelling it suggest). Just like in Talossan, it usually (but not always)
appears before a nasal consonant. And just like in Talossan, there are plenty of words
that look like they ought to have that sound, but don’t.
The explanation for that last point is that languages don’t have a fixed lexicon
from the beginning of their development to the present. Words related to the same Latin
root can come into the language at different periods, some missing out on sound changes
that others went through. That’s why Romanian has both mânie (anger) and manie
(mania). Now there is still room for regularisation, and there’s still the issue that the
sound is difficult for English speakers to pronounce, but I really think that getting rid of î
altogether and completely undoing this fascinating Talossan sound change would be
throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This proposal goes well beyond the points of
Proposal 1 (the Overarching Proposal).
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I wrote a few paragraphs one time arguing that Talossan î isn’t a letter (in the alphabetic
sense) at all, but rather a leftover grapheme from the days when the language was written
by hand, when it meant something like vowel-followed-by-nasal. But whatever. I really
think it needs to go. Nobody (Ben included) knew how to pronounce it, it represents not
just one or two or three, but SIX Latin source vowels, and (to my mind) it’s really ugly.
19.
Number 8 (eliminating cj) is addressed in my paragraph 5 above.
20.
Number 14 says to “replace all instances of y with i.” That should exclude all
instances like “y-axis,” of course.
Yes, of course.
21.
Under the existing rules, the default stressmark for o is a circumflex (unlike the
other vowels which take either acute or grave accents). So somewhere before step 15 we
need another step saying to replace all instances of ô with ó or ò. Then in step 15 we’ll
analyze whether those stressmarks are necessary, and also use ô for the new purpose of
stressmarking ö.
Right. Otherwise we confuse ourselves. Even more.
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