Editing Manchu language (section)

==== Stress ====
[[Stress (linguistics)|Stress]] in Manchu has been described in very different ways by different scholars.<ref>Gorelova (2002: 99–102) and references therein.</ref> According to Paul Georg von Möllendorff (1892), it was always on the last syllable. In contrast, [[Ivan Zakharov]] (1879) gives numerous specific rules: on the one hand, he seems to say that every [[Phonological word|prosodic word]] lent slight prominence to the vowel of its first syllable by lengthening it, but on the other hand suffixes such as the case markers and the interrogative particles received stress, as did the perfect participle suffix and the optative suffix when these forms have future meaning. In the closely related Xibe, Jerry Norman (1974) found yet another system – stress was usually penultimate (rarely antepenultimate) in the stem and was not affected by the addition of suffixes, except for monosyllabic suffixes beginning in a voiceless sound, which were treated as part of the stem for the purposes of stress placement. Disyllabic suffixes sometimes had secondary stress of their own.