Talk:Timing (linguistics)

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Removed following babble from main page:

--24.22.151.182 00:36, 12 November 2005 (UTC)william arnold montegue24.22.151.182 00:36, 12 November 2005 (UTC)--

Disbomber 02:10, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Removal of 'Changes in timing' section

I have removed the following, as it suggests that Spanish is normally stress-timed. It is, however, of interest, & I shall try to find another place for it: ==Changes in timing== These patterns can change over time or be borrowed from other languages. For example, Mexican Spanish, due to its phonetic Nahuatl substratum, shows a marked tendency towards stress timing, which makes it sound as if influenced by American English prosody. There are reports of Mexican people pronouncing "los Estados Unidos" as two "syllables", which actually means the speaker marks two beats or stress peaks (over /ta/ and /ni/), in the same way that e. g. an Argentine Spanish speaker would mark the two syllabic peaks in a word like "pompón". The pervasive vowel reduction and shortening found in English is in part a consequence of stress timing; Mexican Spanish under this influence shows signs of vowel shortening as well. - Removed by Rothorpe 22:28, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge of subsidiary articles

I'm strongly in favor of the merge of Syllable-timed language, Mora-timed language, and Stress-timed language into this article. There are a lot of bigger problems (such as poor referencing and scholarly controversy), but I think those would be easier to address if everything is in one article instead of four. Furthermore, the whole concept of a stress timed language (and likewise for the other two) is controversial (per cites in Timing (linguistics)), and it would be easier to address this debate if we don't, by our division into articles, assume one answer or the other. Kingdon (talk) 17:00, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

I have completed this merge. The old talk pages are still at Talk:Stress-timed language and Talk:Syllable-timed language (I think leaving them there, with these links from this talk page, is proper procedure, although I don't do this often enough to be sure). There was no talk page at Talk:Mora-timed language. There remain some passages which lurch back and forth a bit awkwardly. That is, one sentence/paragraph assumes the distinction between stress-timed and syllable-timed, and the next sentence/paragraph throws cold water on that distinction, and then maybe the next switches back, but I wasn't attempting a complete rewrite, just getting these articles merged without doing anything too horrible to the text. Kingdon (talk) 04:55, 1 June 2008 (UTC)