United States (United States) Suomalainen Varis wrote:I see. I'm not sure if I'll use it at all, because I'm not sure if stress can really makes any difference. I know that for English, certain words have the same written form, but the only difference is on the stress.
Most languages have some sort of stress, they just don't necessarily have word stress. And if they do have word stress, it's not necessarily distinctive. It may simply be fixed (as in Irish, Polish, Finnish, etc.).
The basic purpose of stress is to help a listener parse utterances. Without it, you end up with a monotonous stream of sound. If your language does not have stress of any kind, you might want to think about what other elements it has (prosodic or otherwise) which help listeners break down sentences and phrases and allow speakers to add emphasis. (In Irish, for instance, there are a lot of syntactic transformations which place emphasis on particular words and some words--notably pronouns--have distinct emphatic forms.)