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Ash: Difference between revisions
→Phonology
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| Plosive or fricative followed by nasal | | Plosive or fricative followed by nasal | ||
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===Prosody and stress=== | |||
Prefixes are always unstressed. Following the last stressed syllable an iambic pattern of secondary stress on every other underlyingly light syllable follows unless an underlyingly heavy syllable intervenes, resetting the pattern. In addition, unless at the end of a word, stressed syllables are forced to be heavy either by lengthening of the vowel or reduplication of the next syllable's onset consonant if they are not already underlyingly so. | Prefixes are always unstressed. Following the last stressed syllable an iambic pattern of secondary stress on every other underlyingly light syllable follows unless an underlyingly heavy syllable intervenes, resetting the pattern. In addition, unless at the end of a word, stressed syllables are forced to be heavy either by lengthening of the vowel or reduplication of the next syllable's onset consonant if they are not already underlyingly so. | ||
====Orthographical ambiguity==== | |||
While the stress could sometimes be ambiguous in the romanisation based on spelling alone, basic knowledge of the grammar and what constitutes an unstressed prefix is enough for the reading to be predictable most of the time, and the remaining possible cases are few enough to be memorised on a lexical basis, and so stress is left unmarked. | |||
An example is the endonym of the language itself, ''ahgaa'', where ''ah-'' looks like a common unstressed prefix but is in fact stressed; however a corresponding word with the syllable unstressed does not exist and so there is no ambiguity once the word has been learned. | |||
==Morphology== | ==Morphology== | ||