Word Stress

Just a short word about stress. It's a topic a little beyond those who just want to put some alien looking words in their stories.

Certainly if you use accent stress instead of tone and do not mark stress, no one will know for sure how you want the words stressed. This isn't exactly a great tragedy, in fact, in most cases, it won't matter. But the one thing you do not want to do is to choose a stress scheme and later forget what it was. It will almost guaranty that the phrases that sound great in your head to start with, will sound awful months later.

The choices for stress are endless. You can have stress consistently on the initial syllable like in Czech. You can have stress always on the end syllable like French. You can always have stress on the second-to-last syllable as in Polish. You can have variable stress as in English. You can even avoid strong in-word stresses as in Japanese. Some form of consistent stress would be easiest to remember.

For my own language stress is mostly dependent on the part of speech. It gives the language a very distinctive cadence. My original intent was to have the parts of speech rigidly defined and then have word stress float to fit the sentence and it's intent. Gradually the stresses have become more fixed in my mind, though there is some wiggle room still in nouns with suffixes, in verbs, and in adjectives.