The Importance of Pitch Accent in Languages

Bianca is making a joke that I'm sure other conlangers will appreciate earlier this week. One of her daughters young very reasonably said then how does he write books? Yes. We just help people understand the in jokes. So ignoring for the moment pitch accent another issue of stress that comes into discussion is a language might be described as stress timed, syllable timed or mora timed. Now this is an interesting distinction to make and seems intuitively obvious for some languages but once you go into the lab and try to find a proof about what's going on it becomes very slippery. Those are devilish to do.