Re: Pronunciation dictionaries?

1) When a 'stronger' stress mark ' or ^ overrides it. Example: sótão,
bênção.

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:39:20 +0100: António Marques <m.ap@xxxxxxx>: in
sci.lang:
There is no concept of relative strength of stress marks in portuguese.

There is. My examples prove it.

The available diacritics either mark stress or they don't. This is a
fundamental principle of the orthography.

In your view, yes. But another view is possible, and leads to a
plausible explanation of the same observations of reality.

I simply didn't and don't understand why one of those views must be
principally wrong, if they both work.

Perhaps we should look at history. The tilde ~ used to be an
shorthand, for various things (as in q~ = que), but often for n or m.
So ã comes from an of ana, and ão from ano or ion. From that
perspective, you are right and I am not. But for today's Portuguese,
my view also works.

Breaking it is simply not an
option. For instance, they tried to break it by having adverbs formed
from -e^s words keep the ^ (*corte^smente). It didn't work.

That's because there is no backward, cursive version for the
circonflex, like there is for the acute: the grave.
I think such a backward ^ should be introduced.

2) For morphological reasons, when suffixes are added. Examples:
mãozinho, manhãzinha.

Just what it is that happens for morphological reasons? (I know what it
is; I'm pointing out that this item is not homomorph with the preceding
one.)

A suffix is added, which takes the primary stress, leaving at most
secondary stress in the original place. With a backward tilde, this
could be accurately described too.

OF COURSE one can build all kinds of rules to end up with the same
result. The problem here is that a good orthographic system follows
structuring principles, which in turn ideally take advantage of the
language's phonology, phonotaxis and yes, morphology - and, at least for
portuguese, in that order. It's not just a random house of cards to
which you add at will as long as the output is the same.

I think it is.

To gleefully violate two important principles [...]

But why are these principles? Why should they be?

as these ones* perhaps suggests that your understanding of
the orthography is not the same one found in the normal
portuguese speaker.

Certainly. I'm not a native speaker, far from it.

And the reason I dwell so much on this is that I wish you
understood it so that you wouldn't mislead other people.

I don't mislead anyone, because my results are the same.

But I'll make a note about adding the other view on this matter too.
Some day.


--
Ruud Harmsen
http://rudhar.com
.