Unstressed

After midnight on the 13th of March of 2022, I cooked a soup snack of instant noodles with pieces of cabbage, asparagus, and dried anchovies which my brother gave me for my birthday some weeks ago. I drank coffee. I prepared my books for a review of my Brazilian Carioca accent in Portuguese and of Russian phonology. When I heard from afar people speaking either of these two languages, I often mistook it for the other. These languages were funny in the way the vowels "squished" or "bloated" like rubber, depending if they were unstressed or stressed. Afterwards, I ate chocolate-laced Italian biscotti. In the drizzling morning after 10 o'clock, I walked to the pizzeria. On the way, on the other side of the main road, running in the opposite direction, was a little stocky boy with dark hair. At the pizzeria, I ate two slices and drank a diet black cola. A couple of city punks with a skateboard visited the Lulu Island suburban pizza parlour. A basketball game was in progress on the big screen, with the sound off. At home, I practiced my Brazilian Carioca accent, as I read aloud the novel Os filhos de Matusalem, or Methuselah's Children, by Robert Heinlein.

Type D half-lines ending in words of this type are analysed by Hutcheson as ending in two completely unstressed syllables. That analysis must be descriptively correct for, say, the 10th cent.; whether it would have fitted the facts in the 8th cent. is much less clear.