Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 13:28:37 -0500

From: Mark Mandel Mark[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]DRAGONSYS.COM

Subject: Dialects that could have been -Reply



Dan Goodman dsgood[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]VISI.COM 0930.0856 writes:



From: Mark Mandel Mark[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]DRAGONSYS.COM

[...]

Damon Knight's "What Rough Beast" has a few sentences in an alternate

world Canadian dialect of Yiddish.





Hmm... I think it was Knight who wrote "You're Another", in which the

future filmmaker manipulating our present speaks Esperanto (not very

well, from what little we see; I suspect the author was using a dictionary

and the basic grammar found in summaries like "The 16 Rules"). The

filmmaker character's English was allegedly Esperanto-accented, but

mechanically so:

* Consonant substitutions like d for edh: reasonable

* Stress always shifted to penult: only superficially reasonable.



Why "only superficially"? I remember this example from the story:

"Now you vill give me d'inSTRUment"

= "Now you will give me the instrument"



Eo stress is always penultimate, except in poetic syncope. But I think an

Eo native speaking E, when faced with an obvious loan-"cognate", would

keep the stress on the same syllable that has it in Eo: in this case,

instruMENto (caps added to show stress), syncopatable to

instruMENT'

Eo-accented E instruMENT

rather than ??inSTRUment



Mark A. Mandel : mark[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]dragonsys.com

Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200

320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02160, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com/