Thank you. It is helpful for me to understand (American?) English better. As I said I am not a native speaker of English, so I am happy to be instructed about English. In order to benefit from native speaker intuition I really need to start out with Danish, which would beStephen Carlson wrote:Here's the deal. English has both word stress and a pitch accent. The word stress is lexical, but the pitch accent is supra-segmental (Swedish has a lexical pitch accent, by the way). The English pitch accent is always aligned on a word stress (with one rare exception). There is usually one, but sometimes two, pitch accents within an intonation contour (basically a simple clause). Since word stress is lexical, it does not convey emphasis. Rather, English speakers sense "emphasis" wherever the pitch accent occurs, and it will occur where the word stress is.Iver Larsen wrote:Maybe I need to ask the question in a different forum? For this exercise I am not interested in the difference between word stress and pitch accent. English is a stress language, but stress is not marked in the writing system, so I tried to put italics on the words that I would expect to be stressed. I am not a native speaker of English, but I expect the first sentence to have a normal word stress pattern. Maybe I needed to mark both secondary and primary stress, but that is more difficult to type, and I am not sure I am competent in English to do that.
So the the difference between word stress and pitch accents is important, regardless of your interest in them.
I realize that I've probably studied too much of this topic for you to be interested in my opinion, but, if you are sincerely interested in the naive intuitions about the English sentences, you would need to forget the word stresses and just mark the pitch accents, just one (or possibly two) per clause. We have an actor in the States by the name of William Shatner, who is parodied for emphasizing too many words in a sentence. That's how your sentences sound to this native English speaker.Iver Larsen wrote: I am interested in hearing how a native speaker who has not studied linguistic theories would understand the difference between the two.
1. Hvis DU havde været her, var min BROR ikke død
1a. If you had been here, my brother would not be dead (We cannot say: would not have died.)
We use stress rather than pitch unlike English, Swedish and Norwegian. We have primary and secondary stress, so I have now marked the primary stress with italics and the secondary stress with capitals. Secondary stress does not seem to exist in English, so that confused me. 1. above is similar to what Randall wrote earlier, and it fits the Greek sentence:
1b. εἰ ἦς ὧδε οὐκ ἂν ἀπέθανεν ὁ ἀδελφός μου (John 11:21)
It would be possible to emphasize "you" as well as "here" in Danish by changing from secondary or no stress to primary stress, but that kind of emphasis is not in the Greek sentence and it would not be natural and expected in the context.
Maybe the reason I did not get an answer to my question is that it does not work well or is not clear in English.
The question was in what way John 11:32 is different from 11:21:
2. εἰ ἦς ὧδε οὐκ ἄν μου ἀπέθανεν ὁ ἀδελφός.
In Danish I would express the difference as I see it by changing the stress as follows:
2a. Hvis DU havde været her, var min bror ikke DØD
(2b If you had been here, my brother would not be dead.)
Other options are:
3. Hvis DU havde været her, var min bror ikke DØD (That would suggest a contrast between a brother and, say, a sister.)
4. Hvis DU havde været her, var min bror ikke DØD (That would suggest a contrast between my brother and someone else's brother.)
These nuances are complex and can vary even between closely related languages as well as between speakers of the same language. Since we do not have a KOINE native speaker intuition, we can hardly be dogmatic about the best analysis. What makes best sense to me does not necessarily make sense to others.