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How to manage stress with PhoMo
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This public article was written by [Deactivated User], and last updated on 27 Apr 2018, 23:07.

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Menu 1. (Phonotactic stress) Step 1: creating your language's phonology 2. (Phonotactic stress) Step 2: making a PhoMo ruleset 3. (Phonotactic stress) Step 3: getting PhoMo to write stress properly 4. (Orthographic stress) Step 1: creating your language's phonology 5. (Orthographic stress) Step 2: making a PhoMo ruleset 6. (Orthographic stress) Step 3: making stressed vowels 7. Fixing syllable structure issues 8. Mixing phonotactical and orthographical stresses Hello there! I'm here to talk about something that has been asked about a lot: how to get ConWorkShop to write stress properly in your language? It's an important feature in languages and it's not very easy to do here. So I thought I'd help.

Warning: this article assumes you already know what PhoMo is and how it basically works. If you don't, I highly recommend you read this main help page about it, as well as this help page about rules and finally this list of examples of rules in the flesh. Nevertheless, I'm not going to skip any step. So if you don't know how to use PhoMo, just follow my lead and you should get it done. If you're having trouble, you can ask any question in the « Minor questions not worth their own thread » thread situated in this board.

Also, Don't Panic!™ I also summarized the functioning of PhoMo below if you're totally confused.

Ready? Let's go.

▼ Toggle the quick overview of the PhoMo features we're going to use


__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The following part of the tutorial only applies if you don't have distinct letters for your stressed vowels. Scroll down to the next big fat text if you do.


[top](Phonotactic stress) Step 1: creating your language's phonology


Technically, it is not necessary that your phonology is all set up before you skip to the next steps. But if it is not, you will have to change stuff later on. That's why I highly recommend (especially if you're a noob) that your phonology is as complete as possible before you mess with stress. Of course, it will still be possible for you to change things once you mastered the technique.

Go to green tab > phonology, then add the phonemes you need. Then edit the orthography and assign graphemes to your phonemes.

[top](Phonotactic stress) Step 2: making a PhoMo ruleset


A very basic step: green tab > Phonology > Pronounciation estimation, then "create ruleset".

[top](Phonotactic stress) Step 3: getting PhoMo to write stress properly


Now, go to yellow tab > phonetics > PhoMo and select your new ruleset in the "Ruleset" dropdown menu. Then hit "Edit" next to "Categories", then "↺ Vowels (IPA)" and "↺ Consonants (IPA)".

The rest of the programming will depend a lot on what you want to do for your language. For the following examples, let's assume it has penultimate stress (stress on the second-to-last syllable) except when the word ends with a vowel, in which case it's ultimate. To do that, we have to write the following rules.

V/ˈ%@-2/C#
V/ˈ%@-1/V#
Cˈ/?


Here's what those rules are doing: V/ˈ%@-2/C# adds a stress mark "ˈ" before the second-to-last vowel if the word ends with a consonant (technically replaces the second-to-last vowel, whatever it is, by itself but preceded by "ˈ", if the word ends with a consonant). But "ˈ" is not in the right place yet, as the stress mark has to be before the consonant of the syllable it's marking. That's what Cˈ/? is for; it interchanges the stress mark with the consonant preceding it.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The following part of the tutorial only applies if you have distinct letters for your stressed vowels. Scroll up to the previous big fat text if you don't.


[top](Orthographic stress) Step 1: creating your language's phonology


Technically, it is not necessary that your phonology is all set up before you skip to the next steps. But if it is not, you will have to change stuff later on. That's why I highly recommend (especially if you're a noob) that your phonology is as complete as possible before you mess with stress. Of course, it will still be possible for you to change things once you mastered the technique.

Go to green tab > phonology, then add the phonemes you need. Then edit the orthography and assign graphemes to your phonemes.

[top](Orthographic stress) Step 2: making a PhoMo ruleset


A very basic step: green tab > Phonology > Pronounciation estimation, then "create ruleset".

[top](Orthographic stress) Step 3: making stressed vowels


Now the interesting part begins. PhoMo doesn't officially manage stress, but it allows us to if we're smart enough.

Now, go to green tab > Phonology > Pronounciation estimation, and take a look at the second field, "Override estimated IPA". Fill it with replacements for the graphemes of your stressed vowels by stressed phonemes, like this:
yourStressedGrapheme|ˈtheVowel

To be more precise, assuming you have the letter <á> for a stressed /a/, the replacement will be this:
á|ˈa

Side note: pay attention to the delimiter which is | in the override and not / like in PhoMo. Don't ask why.

You'll have to do it with all your potentially stressed vowels, which shouldn't take too long nor much effort.

So far, you've told your language that it has distinct graphemes for its stressed vowels. You've also taught it to mark it down phonetically, but the stress is positioned wrong (it should be right before the consonant of the syllable, not the vowel). Now, let's explain to your language how to fix that.

Cˈ/?

Yep, that's just it. It interchanges the stress mark with the consonant preceding it.

Side note: to get this last trick to work, you need to have a phonetic category containing all of your language's consonants. To do that, go to yellow tab > Phonetics > PhoMo, then hit "edit" next to "Categories", then hit "↺ Consonants (IPA)".

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↓ If you're still having issues ↓


[top]Fixing syllable structure issues


Keep in mind that you might have to copy the rule Cˈ/? several times depending on your syllable structure. For example, the rule Cˈ/?, along with the override, would turn /laspó/ into /lasˈpo/ whereas the expected result could pretty much be /laˈspo/. To display the latter, you have to use the rule Cˈ/? twice.

If you end up with a result like /laˈwpo/, where a forbidden "stress mark + glide + consonant + vowel" structure appears, that means your ruleset has to be improved to manage stress involving glides. That's very easy to do: create a G category filled with your glides (typically /w,j/ unless you have more of them) and add ˈG/?/_CV to your ruleset. That rule means "interchange a glide with a stress mark if it's followed by a whole syllable (consonant + vowel)".

Again, you might have to adjust the rules to your syllable structure, but hopefully you'll be able to do that on your own now.

[top]Mixing phonotactical and orthographical stresses


In my language  Unnamed, stress is usually penultimate, so that's easy to explain to PhoMo. But when it's not, it's marked orthographically (like in Italian or Spanish). So how do I take care of that?

It's actually extremely easy. I simply add a regular rule for my phonotactic stress, but this time I also use a condition.

V/ˈ%@-2/ˈ=0

If you followed the chapter about phonotactic stress, you will figure that this rule means « add a stress mark before the penultimate vowel of the word », which fits my need. But what's with the condition? In fact, ˈ=0 is very straightforward: it means zero stress marks. So the whole rule means « add a stress mark before the penultimate vowel of the word if the word doesn't have a stress mark yet ».

I then add the following rules to have the stress mark showing at the right place (twice because of my syllable structure).

Cˈ/?
Cˈ/?


This way, I can take care of both stresses without them overlapping, so that I can end up with such beautiful results as shown below, without having to write stress manually at all.

And remember that if you're having trouble despite how well this article was written by me, totally on my own and without the help of the awesome and patient @Multinet, you can ask any question in the « Minor questions not worth their own thread » thread situated in this board.






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