August 22nd, 2012, 10:40 am
Even though I haven't had too much insight into actual Solresol - never having written or said any sentence in it - I'm wondering how much you actually need those stresses in Solresol to tell apart word function?
It appears to me, that the whole stress-based grammar of Solresol is unnecessarily cumbersome and stressful - forgive me on that one. xD
Is it really required to stress every word to make clear that it's a noun, verb, adjective or what not? Shouldn't that be obvious by the sentence's structure alone (SVO)? Having studied Chinese I know for sure, that it works just fine for isolating languages to not mark the sentence function of every word... and well English isn't that far from an isolating language as well and yet you don't confuse the words' function even though many times verbs and nouns look the same. (to) water, fall, function vs (the) water, fall, function - how do you tell them apart? By context.
As for Solresol, I think it would be perfectly fine to stress only nouns (if at all).
That way, you already know what the subject and object of any sentence are. Adjectives are obvious, since they precede the noun, the verb (and optional adverb) follows the first noun (aka the subject) and should therefore be understood perfectly as well.
(actually you could call this a German('s) approach ^^ as in German all! nouns are capitalized and thus marked for their function in writing)
In my opinion this would ease Solresol pronunciation a lot, since you wouldn't have to care about stress all the time. By the way, someone was wondering about how to pronounce a 4-syllable word without stress (as proposed for Solresol verbs): According to my proposal, every word could be pronounced on the second to last syllable, except the nouns which would be pronounced on the first syllable and said question would be solved.
Of course stress could also fall on the first syllable usually and on the second to last for nouns or whatever - the basic idea of mine is: Two types of stress: One for nouns, and one for every other part of speech.
tl;dr - Read the bold text.
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Edit/Add on*:
One should also note that all the stressing is even more difficult when not using (alphabetic) writing or speech. How would you stress using colors, music, numbers, knocking etc.?
Thus I think the language actually has to work without stress... or it wouldn't work at all.
Although, it's fair enough to assume that by far the most communication IS written or spoken, and yet I'm against using the original stress pattern.
As I read, stressing is made by either lengthening vowels or (for female words) lengthening the consonants.
While Finnish and Japanese people won't have problems pronouncing long consonants, I think most of us will. Even more so, when there's an additional long vowel before or after that consonant...
Im my eyes, that's far to complicated for a language supposed to be easy and easy to learn for everyone.
* an "addit"?
It appears to me, that the whole stress-based grammar of Solresol is unnecessarily cumbersome and stressful - forgive me on that one. xD
Is it really required to stress every word to make clear that it's a noun, verb, adjective or what not? Shouldn't that be obvious by the sentence's structure alone (SVO)? Having studied Chinese I know for sure, that it works just fine for isolating languages to not mark the sentence function of every word... and well English isn't that far from an isolating language as well and yet you don't confuse the words' function even though many times verbs and nouns look the same. (to) water, fall, function vs (the) water, fall, function - how do you tell them apart? By context.
As for Solresol, I think it would be perfectly fine to stress only nouns (if at all).
That way, you already know what the subject and object of any sentence are. Adjectives are obvious, since they precede the noun, the verb (and optional adverb) follows the first noun (aka the subject) and should therefore be understood perfectly as well.
(actually you could call this a German('s) approach ^^ as in German all! nouns are capitalized and thus marked for their function in writing)
In my opinion this would ease Solresol pronunciation a lot, since you wouldn't have to care about stress all the time. By the way, someone was wondering about how to pronounce a 4-syllable word without stress (as proposed for Solresol verbs): According to my proposal, every word could be pronounced on the second to last syllable, except the nouns which would be pronounced on the first syllable and said question would be solved.
Of course stress could also fall on the first syllable usually and on the second to last for nouns or whatever - the basic idea of mine is: Two types of stress: One for nouns, and one for every other part of speech.
tl;dr - Read the bold text.
---------------------
Edit/Add on*:
One should also note that all the stressing is even more difficult when not using (alphabetic) writing or speech. How would you stress using colors, music, numbers, knocking etc.?
Thus I think the language actually has to work without stress... or it wouldn't work at all.
Although, it's fair enough to assume that by far the most communication IS written or spoken, and yet I'm against using the original stress pattern.
As I read, stressing is made by either lengthening vowels or (for female words) lengthening the consonants.
While Finnish and Japanese people won't have problems pronouncing long consonants, I think most of us will. Even more so, when there's an additional long vowel before or after that consonant...
Im my eyes, that's far to complicated for a language supposed to be easy and easy to learn for everyone.
* an "addit"?
