Goal: Write a section on syllables and stress
Note: This section focuses on your proto-forms only; these features can shift through sound changes.
Tip: Tonal languages can evolve from proto-forms bearing stress (rather than tone).
Work focus: Solidify/Write/Share
Now that you have worked with a variety of word-like nonce forms using your selected sounds and syllable structures, it’s time to write up a section on syllables and stress describing your choices. Really, this can be less of a section and more of a bulleted list to indicate what the maximum syllable structure is (and minimum syllable structure if you restricted syllables in that way, too), constraints on coda consonants and/or consonant clusters (if applicable), and a description of which syllable within a multisyllabic unit receives the stress.
I suggest keeping this section/list with the IPA charts of your starting inventory. When you start creating words tomorrow, you will want to have this information handy. If you made any changes to your starting sound inventory, make sure you update the IPA charts to match your current vision of the language. It’s important to always revise the documentation any time you make changes to the language.
Finally, remember that all of this is for the proto-language form. These notes will help you consistently create proto-forms that fit into the system you’re designing, but they will not necessarily reflect how the more modern forms of your language look and sound after you select and apply sound changes to them. Sound changes can affect the inventory of sounds in your language, allowable syllable structures, and stress. Sound changes can even introduce tone into a previously stress-based system (if you’re interested in that route, I highly suggest you research tonogenesis to start thinking about ways you might want to incorporate tone in your system later on!).
All that is to say, if you like what you have right now but are kind of wishing you had included another sound or two or a different syllable pattern, remember that you can use sound changes to incorporate those sounds and features without revising the proto-forms of your language.