http://dustyfeet.com/dissertation/1sthalf.pdf


"Stress results from a combination of factors such as syllable length, pitch, and vowel quality, as well as loudness" {the latter has to be influenced by something IMO}

{ Guilhem's poetry influenced by Arabic? Basque? Germanic? it's clearly stress-timed; but I see a marriage of stress- and syllable in Italian but they just have long/short syllables the consonant, the dipthong this influences Finnish but I posit this creates stress anyway what went on in Arabic? }


* * *

http://rnoske.home.xs4all.nl/CV/publicaties/autonomous_typological.pdf

{ deletion of syllables vowel reduction as well as dipthongization in Old French because of stress? }

"4.1.2
Diphthongization
A process of diphthongization was ope
rative in Gallo-Romance and Old
French in stressed syllables (Pope 1953: 60-62, 103-104, La Chaussée
1989:182, 185, 187, 194). Examples: mel [mel] > [mi
?
l] ‘honey’, cor [k
?
r] >
[ku
?
r] ‘heart’, mare [
'
ma
?
re] > [
'
ma
?
r
?
] ‘sea’"

"5.1.1
Syllable timed languages versus stress timed languages
According to the theory of syllab
le timed languages vs. stress timed
languages proposed by Pike (1945) and
Abercrombie (1967), there are two
types of languages: those which main
tain an equal temporal distance
between syllables and those which keep
an equal distance between stressed
syllables. The first group, syllable
timed languages, would include
languages like Spanish and French, whereas the second group, stress time
languages, would contain among
others English and German.
With the further development of the study of acoustic phonetics,
however, this idea was refuted by
phonetic measurements. For instance,
Wenk & Wioland (1982) show
that the distances be
tween French syllables
are all but equal, and t
hus French does not neatly
fit under the syllable-
timed category. "
{ yes but the Academie forced Frendch poetry to be read with equal syllable length but that was post Middle Ages }
{ says modern French is perceivable as syllable-timed old French as stress-timed in any case so Oc too }