I don't think my reply got sent to the group, so here it is:
Oh, ok. I'll keep that in mind the next time I'm translating something.
Thanks for the heads up.
-- Joshua Taylor
On Monday, January 16, 2017 at 4:55:15 PM UTC-5, Ilmen wrote:
On 16/01/2017 21:59, Joshua Taylor wrote:
> About your comment on stress. I think two years ago (at the time I
> first wrote this) I would have disagreed with you, but reading it
> again, you're completely right. If I were to start over, I'd be a
> little more loose with the syllable counts and put more weight on
> lining of the stresses. Though to be fair, my thinking back then, I
> remember, was that it would be sung by breaking lojbanic stress rules
> when necessary. My reasoning was that while there is a correct and a
> wrong way to place stress on lojban jufra, there are no minimal pairs
> for stress: it never changes the meaning of anything. Is this correct?
While it is true that there exist no pair of Lojban words distinguished
only by a difference in stress position, stressed syllables play an
essential role in segmenting a Lojban syllable stream into words :
stress is one of Lojban's devices for determining word boundaries.
Let's look at a couple examples:
{SEpliseTAvla} is parsed as {sepli se tavla}, "talked to separately".
But:
{sePLIseTAvla} is parsed as {se plise tavla}, "talk of apple strains".
{dinSAUru} is parsed as {dinsauru} (a single word).
But:
{DINsauru} is parsed as {dinsau ru}, which is the lujvo "dinsau"
followed by the pronoun "ru".
Therefore you can effectively change the meaning of a sentence by
shifting stress positions.
—Ilmen.