Right, time to discuss stress more fully. When I last mentioned stress, in a passing comment in the first post, I said this:
Stress is basically word-initial. Some speakers show shift to the post-initial in cases when the initial has a schwa and the post-initial a non-schwa vowel, but this isn't universal.
I've now come to the conclusion that this is very much an incomplete description that deserves a lot more discussion. This will involve some discussion of the historical background which led to the development of the current Asta vowel system, as this makes a lot of the complexities found in the system much more transparent.
So, to begin, what is the actual stress system of Asta? Well essentially it is a mobile stress system with the quality of the vowel nuclei being the main determining factor. The primary stress will always fall within the root (note, not the phonological word as the above description implies), and always upon a full (i.e. non-schwa) vowel within that root. Which of the "full" vowels is selected however is not always entirely predictable, at least on the surface. In particular, while the default seems to be the first full vowel, there are a number of cases where the primary stress instead seems to fall on the second, e.g.
-uŋwá "closed/shut",
-iyáwə "awake/alert" and
ne‘é‘ "ant". The vowel /e/ in particular seems be be strongly attractive to stress, with vanishingly few occurrences in unstressed syllables.
What's going on here? Let's start from the beginning. Proto-Asta, as indicated elsewhere, is believed to have had a three-vowel system *a *i *u, with a length contrast and two diphthongs *ai *au. In this system stress was once again mobile but weight-sensitive - the primary stress was on the initial syllable of the root unless a longer vowel or a diphthong followed it in the next syllable, in which case the stress moved rightward to that syllable in the case of a root-initial short vowel and may optionally have moved in that direction in the case of a root-initial long vowel (this explains a seemingly irregular post-initial stress in a handful of roots such as
-aŋé "loud").
In the development of this system to modern Asta, the main change was that unstressed short vowels were reduced to schwa. This happened after rounding/palatalisation had been transferred to preceding consonants. Furthermore the long vowels merged with their short counterparts, further obscuring the weight-based motivaion for the system, and the diphthongs did likewise. *ai in particular underwent a noticeable a stress-based split to /e/ in syllables where it carried stress as /i/ in other cases, with the differences with long *ii in unstressed syllables being recoverable from the presence/absence of palatalisation of a preceding consonant. The comparative status of the *au diphthong is somewhat less clear as the merger with /u/ seems very near complete, though an intermediate stage of *o in stressed syllables may have broken into modern /wa/ after velars.
Afterwards resulting schwas underwent the affectation processes that still operate in the language today - rounding before labiovelars, fronting before palatals and total assimilation over the glottal stop. This latter process produced the vanishingly few instances of unstressed /e/ that we have, including the
ne‘é‘ "ant" example given above. In particular, it will be noted that thee affected schwas are still tret like schwas for the purpose of stress assignment.
I will note that these processes have not as of yet generated any pairs of words which differ solely on the basis of stress, and I will continue not to mark primary stress in examples, nevertheless the potential is there for a more robust stress contrast to develop.
Now after that groundwork on primary stress location it is time to turn to the larger topic of feet and rhythm. Asta seems to prefer trochees over iambs, as the default root-initial stress location would appear to indicate, but is tolerant of both. In particular, the addition of prefixes frequently entails a shift from trochaic to iambic rhythm, as they do not appear to have affected the primary stress location (with the possible exception of roots with two long vowels/diphthongs, which may have been post-intially stressed without a prefix but initially stressed with one. If so the is no synchronic evidence for this alternation however). The reverse shift is also possible with roots that have post-initial primary stress but a prefix with a full vowel (e.g.
min- "first person plural), which resultss a trochaic rhythm with a secondary stress location before the primary stress (see below). Additionally, the iambic rhythm appears comparatively unstable, as it is possible for a word to switch from iambic to trochaic rhythm but not the other way round (see below).
The secondary stress locations will thus be determined by this rhythm, with trochaic rhythm placing secondary stress on successive odd syllables and iambs on successive even ones. Schwas (effected or not) will tend to push secondary stresses rightwards another syllable, combining with the preceding foot to create a dactylic foot in trochaic rhythm and the following foot to create an antidactylic foot in iambic. In the case of iambic rhythm this only occurs when the preceding vowel is also schwa, otherwise the secondary stress is instead pulled leftwards and the rhythm switches to trochaic. If that still results in a secondary stress on a schwa, this is typically allowed, but the schwa will tend to be pronounced more open in the direction of /a/. In the rare cases where we get more than one schwa prior to the primary stress location a degenerate foot will result.
Some examples of all this with previous examples from this thread:
(muˈwi)(ˌsatriyə)(ˌtixarə)
(ˈmexwəŋən)(ˌnennən)(ˌnennu)(ˌtyi)
(ˌmintə)(ˈtayən)(ˌte)
(miˈnyes)(ˌsessuwə)
(miˈyi)(ˌtasə)(ˌpan)
(ˈmeŋe)(ˌŋixwi)(ˌnyen)