I'm having difficulties figuring out how I want to mark stress in Silvish. The orthography is supposed to be largely French-influenced (the idea being that Silvish speakers who are only literate in French will find it easier to pick up the written form) but for stress, I took a more Italian route. So right now, the main tenets of the system are:
1) Only ultimate stress is marked.
2) Ultimate stress is unmarked if the ult ends in a consonant or long vowel.
3) Ultimate stress is unmarked if the ult contains the monographs <o> or <u>, or the digraph <eu>.
And the stress marker is either an acute accent or a grave accent, following Italian practice. I rather like this system and find it pretty intuitive personally. However, it isn't so user-friendly from the viewpoint of someone who speaks French, where stress is non-contrastive and almost always falls on the ult. It'd be a lot more useful to mark non-ultimate stress.
There's a ready model I could use for that — Arpitan. The
Graphie de Conflans, one of the most common orthographies, has only one principle:
1) Only non-ultimate stress is marked. This is done by underlining the stressed vowel.
I might add an acute accent on final stressed <e>, to make sure Francophones don't read it as silent E. That's super straightforward, and I think the underlines looks both attractive and distinctive. But I worry about compatibility and how well they work behind the scenes. Underlining easily gets erased when you copy-paste, and the markup for it is difficult to read.
A hybrid could work like this:
1) Non-ultimate stress is marked. This is done with Italian acute/grave accents.
2) Ultimate stress is marked on <e> with an acute accent.
While this assists French speakers and avoids the practicality issues of underlines, it clashes with other diacritics. Note that a long vowel is marked with a circumflex. When a long vowel appears in the ult, it must be stressed, so in my current system there's no need to mark it further. But a long vowel in the penultimate syllable could be either stressed or unstressed, and under the hybrid system, that means doubling up diacritics. I'm not a huge fan of that, and I doubt it's well supported.
A connected possibility is to mark all stress. That would make sense because stress is one of the main indicators of boundaries for those phonological "chains" I'm working on. And all of the strategies I've listed above leave some chain endings unmarked. However, that still doesn't answer the question of what to mark stress with.
I put an example sentence in the different styles I listed above. You can find it in the spoiler. Which style do you like best? Do you have a more elegant idea?