Addendum: What if I have a word with a V́VV́ stress pattern? The main stress is almost always on one of the two rightmost syllables, and each syllable two syllables from the syllable with main stress gets secondary stress, except over morpheme boundaries. Would I end up with V́˧VV́˩˥? V́˥˩VV́˩˥?Nortaneous wrote:I need a good way to keep the dynamic negative copula forms in Arve distinct. Right now they're formed by the (very suppletive) negative auxiliary san/zigg/sambe + gerund(?) form (also the citation form) of the dynamic verb trei, although massive amounts of reduction has left the forms mostly indistinct. For example, the active singular, active plural, and passive plural are zigg trei, ziggs treis, and zeijer trei, pronounced [t͡sɪˈʈ͡ʂʌi̯], [t͡sɪʂˈʈ͡ʂʌi̯s], and [t͡sɪçˈʈ͡ʂʌi̯]. I was thinking I could introduce tone, but I'm not sure how much it'd appear outside the verb forms, since it'd obviously come from syllable reduction. For example, since zigg and ziggs only have one syllable in their full forms, but zeijer has two ([ˈt͡sɛh], [ˈt͡sɛç], [ˈt͡sʌi̯jɐ]), some sort of pitch accent thing could come in and make zeijer trei something like [t͡sɪç˥˩ˈʈ͡ʂʌi̯] or [t͡sɪçˈʈ͡ʂʌi̯˩˥]. I'd obviously prefer the second option, since it seems much less messy to have tone only appear on stressed syllables.
How realistic is that?
Also, what if syllables ending in a voiced consonant (including open syllables followed by a voiced consonant) get a lower tone? So sambeger trei would start off with a stress/tone pattern of V́˥V˩V˩V́˥ and end up with something like V́˧˩VV́˩˧, whereas sambesger treis would start off with V́˥V˧V˩V́˥ and end up with V́˥˧VV́˩˧?