Re: permissible syllable codas in major world languages)?

Joachim Pense <snob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Am Wed, 13 Dec 2006 19:53:44 +1300 schrieb Paul J Kriha:
Joachim Pense <snob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Am Tue, 12 Dec 2006 21:08:15 +1300 schrieb Paul J Kriha:
Joachim Pense <snob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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[...]
I don't know how the average Ukrainian in the street pronounces
it but just next door (Slovakia) it's written and pronounced
"Ukrajina", a prefix "u-", noun "kraj", and suffix "-ina".

"j" is consonantal, thus, there's no glottal stop and no diphthong.

Where is the stress?
Joachim

On the first syllable. With very very few exceptions the primary
stress in both Slovak and Czech is on the first syllable.

Is it the case that west slavic languages lost the free accent that
e.g. Russian still has?

I don't think there was any loosing involved here.
Changing to something else, yes, loosing, no.

Polish usually stresses the penultimate syllable, Czech and
Slovak usually stresses the first one, and Russian keeps
floating it in rather peculiar and highly mysterious ways.
Well mysterious even for the speakers of other slavic languages :-)

The important thing to remember is that Czech and Slovak
stress is _completely_ independent of vowel length.
Most of other IE language speakers hear stress and
syllabic length as the same thing. A monoligual speaker
of English has great difficulty in correctly hearing and
pronouncing simple names like Navrátilová with the primary
stress on the first short syllable, second long syllable with
secondary stress, unstressed -ti- and -lo- followed by the
ultimate long syllable -vá.

Generally, schwas are a complete no-no for an educated
sober Cz speaker, so all vowels stressed or not must be
open and clear.


Even when similar or identical words are spoken in E.Slavic
they sound quite different even from a long distance away.

I don't quite get the message of this sentence...

When you hear people talking in the far distance even
though you might not understand what they say at all,
you may recognize the melody and rhythm of the language
and correctly identify it.

If I hear a group of Russians talking and laughing in
the long distance, until they come closer I may not
understand a single word they say but usually I can
tell it's Russian (or some other ESlav. language)
they speak.

Joachim


pjk

P.S. I remember watching an interview with Navrátilová
in the early years of her career. She corrected the interviewer:
"I am not Russian, my name is Navrátilová, not Navratilóva"
The sports reporter didn't understand what she was talking
about, he probably couldn't hear any difference between
those two names, let alone understand why would one
be Russian and the other Czech.

"And my name is Martina, not Martýna!" :-)))

A year later, she conceded and gave that particular game up. :-)


.

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