Re: [lojban] Re: Stress of the penultimate syllable

On 11/1/06, John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

--- "Andrii (lOkadin) Zvorygin" <andrii.z@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Is thIs tExt EAsier tO rEAd? I thInk nOt, becAUse yOU cannOt rEAd It At A
> > nOrmal pAce bUt hAve to slOw dOwn. (It Also lOOks prEtty Ugly.)
> >
>
> please read previous thread on penultimate syllables. English text does NOT
> emphasize the penultimate syllable. It is stress timed. so you have stress
> at regular intervals. There don't seem to be any defined rules as to where
> you should put emphasis in English, so it makes no sense to capitalize
> English.

Actually, each word in English has a fixed stress. There are precious few rules to assign stress
(and they are different in different dialects). Marking stress would make sense in English -- as
it does not generally in Lojban since it varies -- and is significant (i.e., there are words which
differ only or primarily in stress location, with derivative vowel shift: produce (v) v. produce
(n)). The stressed-time feature -- which is more literary than conversational, though we do tend
that way when possible -- is just that we tend to hurry over unstressed syllables to get to the
stressed ones, so that the time between stressed syllables is about constant. The favorite sample
is the nursery rhyme, Three Blind Mice, which has three-stressed lines of (arguably) between three
and eleven syllables.

> Try it, write out some text in English in all lower case, normal mixed case,
> > accented case, and all upper case. The normal mixed case is what you've
> > trained your brain to read best after years of near constant practice. It
> > doesn't take kindly to messing that up.
> >
>
> above statement. .e'o try to stay informed, check Wikipedia before you start
> capitalizing random vowels in English.

I'm not sure what the point of the response is here: the original claim is that we learn to read a
certain pattern of letters without reading separate letters and, thus, when we find different
patters of letters (especially, say, capitals in the middle of words)we cannot read in the usual
way and have to go back to the slower letter-by-letter style.
>

oops quoted wrong line

Is thIs tExt EAsier tO rEAd? I thInk nOt, becAUse yOU cannOt rEAd It At A nOrmal pAce bUt hAve to slOw dOwn. (It Also lOOks prEtty Ugly.)

that's the line I was refering to with the Wikipedia comment. If you are truly fluent in lOjban then you should have no difficulty understanding all it's forms.

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