As far as I know, ancient accent patterns in Sanskrit (and Pali) as well as other ancient Indo-European languages (Greek, Latin etc.) concern _tonal accent_, whereas the ictus (stress by intensity etc) is practically not relevant. The old Indo-European accent was a tonal one, i.e. a pitch or musical accent. These accents are in some cases actually visible due to the use of diacritical signs in early texts (e.g. in Greek and Sanskrit). In Sanskrit the musical accents (recorded in Vedic texts) are known not for all words. Western scholars usually tend to read Sanskrit with the rules for Latin accent.
So the stress used in English and other languages is not really (phonologically) relevant to most Indian and ancient Indo-European languages. Hence there is little or no use in seeking stressed syllables in connection with vowel/syllable length - at least in Sanskrit (this is not to say that stress cannot be found at all...).

Hope I didn't make it only more complicated...
Anton

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, johnny pruitt <mahasacham@...> wrote:
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> Thanks
> that does help. But does this mean that a pa.li word of more than two or three syllables might have multiple accents.
> After speculating about the accents on the main stem I went and looked at a few languages that use prefixes heavily and found that these languages do not stress the main stem as a rule.
> Do you know any of the rules concerning were the placement of accents on sanskrit words goes?
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> thanks
> Johnny
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: P G Dave <pgd2507@...>
> To: Pali@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Sunday, February 24, 2008 5:50:08 PM
> Subject: Re: [Pali] accent of pali
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> I am Indian and speak a few north-Indian languages including Hindi.
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> yes, anujaanaati wud be prounced as accented by you. But the logic seems
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> erroneous... even without the prefix, the word jaanaati, by itself, wud be
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> pronuounced in exactly the same way as when it is a part of anujaanaati.
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> In order to derive a rule on accenting for pronunciation, one needs
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> to recall that vowels are short (hrasva in sanskrit) and long (diirgha in
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> sanskrit), as follows:
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> *hrasva*
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> a
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> i
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> u
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> *diirgha*
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> aa
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> ii
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> uu
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> e
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> ai
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> o
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> au
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> Also, the resultant sound upon attaching these vowels to consonants, follows
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> the short/long character of the attached vowel. Thus breaking up anujaanaati
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> into its components you get:
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> a -- short
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> nu -- short
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> jaa -- long
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> naa -- long
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> ti -- short
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> I spoke a few words and the following rule seems to emerge :
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> All longs are naturally more stressed than shorts and when a long follows a
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> short, it appears slightly more accented.
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> Hope this helps.
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> I wanted to record a few words and upload the file for you but my mic failed
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> me.
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