In addition to the sounds described above, most languages use supersegmental features which vary the volume (loudness), musical pitch and timing of sounds. We'll describe them in that order.
English is a good example of a language with stress: some syllables are pronounced louder, at higher pitch and held longer than they otherwise would be. English words usually have one stressed syllable : the native stress falls on the first syllable of a word, but imported words often have stress on the next-to-last (penultimate) syllable. "Small" words like articles and common prepositions and conjunctions often have no stress, as if they were part of the surrounding words.
In Musa, stressed vowels are written high, hanging from the top of the line. To type them, you press the vowel key, followed by the Space key (while for low vowels you press Space before the vowel sign).
Here's how high vowels are used :
In many analyses, syllables are either stressed or not - there's no third possibility. But some scholars recognize secondary stress, a weaker form of stress.
To understand what's going on, we have to distinguish different sources of stress. The stress we discussed above - primary stress - is lexical: it's part of the pronunciation of the word. INsight and inCITE are both correct, but different; inSTANT is just wrong. Some other languages, like Chinese and French, don't have lexical stress, but they have syntactic stress. In French, the last word of each rhythmic group is stressed (a rhythmic group generally corresponds to a syntactic phrase).
On top of this primary stress is the tonic stress spoken on the nucleus of an intonation phrase. In the sentence My cat is crazy, the stress on the first syllable of crazy is stronger than on the word cat, since crazy is the new information. We mark that in Musa using Intonation marks, which you'll meet on the next page.
Below both of these is metrical stress, related to prosody and rhythmic feet. In English, we speak by alternating a stressed syllable with one or two unstressed syllables, as in The CAT in the HAT. If we have more than two unstressed syllables in a row, we tend to add a metrical stress to one of them, to "break up" the metrical foot. For example, in the word alphabetical, the primary stress falls on bet, but the first syllable is more stressed than the others. We normally show that stress by not reducing the al to ɐl, as we do in words like allow. And that's how we write it in Musa: as an unstressed (low) but unreduced vowel.
In other languages, different rules apply, but the idea is the same. For example, in many languages there's a distinction between heavy and light syllables (or long versus short): syllables with long vowels or final consonants are considered heavy, and attract secondary stress in the rhythmical system. A metrical foot contains one heavy syllable - one stressed syllable in English - and its associated light, short, or unstressed syllables.
However, Musa also offers a metrical notation for indicating prosodic meter when needed. With this notation, we indicate the boundaries of metrical feet with a lone Break separated by spaces. The Break doesn't normally occur next to spaces, even in arithmetic notation (where it has many uses), so there's no ambiguity. When displaying meter like this, we also raise the vowels that are secondarily stressed - one per foot - so that every foot has a heavy syllable. Here's an example, the first couplet of Charivarius' The Chaos (1920), first in normal Musa and then in metrical notation:
Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation.
You can see that, in addition to the Breaks indicating the boundaries of metrical feet (two of which, in this case, happen to replace "linking" offglides in the normal text), the poetic version raises the vowels of in and nun, which are not high in normal text, and writes them as unreduced.
Many languages also use tones to vary the musical pitch of vowels. Musa spells tones using small accent marks over or under the vowels. There are three of them :
Let me show you an example of how these accents are used to write tones. In Chinese, there are four contour tones, and a "fifth" tone consisting of no tone. Here are examples:
中文 | Pinyin | Tone Number | Tone Description | Sound | Musa Tone Name | Musa |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
妈 | mā | 1st tone | Level tone | High Level tone | | |
麻 | má | 2nd tone | Rising tone | High Rising tone | | |
马 | mǎ | 3rd tone | Dipping tone | Low Level tone | | |
骂 | mà | 4th tone | Falling tone | High Falling tone | | |
吗 | ma | "5th" tone | Neutral tone | No tone | |
As you can see, the accents are written above low vowels to indicate a low tone, and below high vowels to indicate a high tone. It's the position of the vowel, not the accent, that makes a tone high or low. Also note that the level tone marks are used for peaking and dipping tones (which are usually written with a circumflex or caret ∧ and a caron or breve ∨).
Here's how this system extends to some other well-known tonal languages:
Tone | Musa | Language | Tone Name |
---|---|---|---|
Mid tone | (high) |
Cantonese | Upper Departing (3rd) |
Vietnamese | ngang (level) | ||
Thai | Mid | ||
High Rising tone | | Chinese | Rising (2nd) |
Cantonese | Upper Rising (2nd) | ||
Vietnamese | ngã (tumbling) | ||
High Level tone | | Chinese | High (1st) |
Hong Kong Cantonese | Upper Level (1st) | ||
Thai | High | ||
High Falling tone | | Chinese | Falling (4th) |
Guangzhou Cantonese | Upper Falling (1st) | ||
Vietnamese | nặng (heavy) | ||
Low Falling tone | | Chinese | 3rd before a different tone |
Cantonese | Lower Level (4th) | ||
Vietnamese | hỏi (asking) | ||
Thai | Falling | ||
Low Level tone | | Chinese | Dipping (3rd) |
Cantonese | Lower Departing (6th) | ||
Vietnamese | huyền (hanging) | ||
Thai | Low | ||
Low Rising tone | | Chinese | 3rd before another 3rd tone |
Cantonese | Lower Rising (5th) | ||
Thai | Rising | ||
Vietnamese | sắc (sharp) | ||
No tone | (low) |
Chinese | Neutral ("5th") |
Here's how the accents are used :
|
|
我有一份工, 果份叫荫功。 |
ngóh yáuh yāt fahn gūng, gwó fahn giu yām gūng. |
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