In addition to marking vowels, the Tiberian system also uses cantillation marks, which serve to mark word stress, semantic structure, and the musical motifs used in formal recitation of the text.
22.
There is no ability to indicate word stress; however, in most cases the reduction of unstressed vowels is sufficient to distinguish word pairs that are distinguished only by stress in spoken discourse.
23.
However, that is not certain : the phonetic conditions that controlled ablaut have never been determined, and the position of the word stress may not have been a key factor at all.
24.
Indeed in most of these languages word stress is much less prominent than it is in, say, English or German; nonetheless it is present both in the language and in the meter.
25.
Some people have looked at word stress patterns to determine the matter or looked at the degree idiomatic meaning ( e . g . " blackboards " are often green not black ).
26.
In other languages, such as French, word stress cannot have this function ( its position is generally predictable ) and is therefore not phonemic ( and is not usually indicated in dictionaries ).
27.
Although this property can be contrastive, the contrast is interpreted by some as being primarily one of tone rather than stress . ( Some linguists analyze Chinese as lacking word stress entirely .)
28.
Placement of word stress is determined by metrical rules that define a characteristic prominence, in which a Strong syllable is assigned stress because it is more prominent than the weak member of the Foot.
29.
:In our stress ( linguistics ) article, it has a nice explanation : " French words are sometimes said to be stressed on the final syllable, but actually French has no word stress at all.
30.
Note that the Vulgar Latin reconstructions are believed to have normalized word stress on the penultimate syllable and that the nasal vowels ( marked with ~ ) were probably commonly realized as their non-nasal counterparts.
