Don’t Stress

Ho-Chunk is a language in the Siouan family (an Indigenous language family of North America) spoken by 250 people in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Nebraska, USA. This problem is about the stress system of Ho-Chunk.

Stress systems give emphasis to some syllables over others. In the English word desert (the place where a cactus grows), the first syllable is stressed. In the English word dessert (a sweet treat after dinner), the second syllable is stressed. There are different levels of stress that a syllable can have. In this problem, we indicate levels of stress by writing letters under syllables: The most strongly-stressed syllable in a word is indicated with P (short for primary stress), other stressed syllables are indicated with S (short for secondary stress), and syllables with no stress are indicated with N. A word can only have one primary stress, but it can have multiple secondary stresses or unstressed syllables.

Each syllable is marked by underlining its vowel or vowels, and the stress letters line up with those underlines in order. For example, the English word kangaroo is written kangaroo with the letters S N P underneath: its strongest stress is on the final syllable, and it has a secondary stress on the first syllable.

Below are some words in Ho-Chunk annotated for stress along with their English translations. The English translations are not necessary for solving this problem. Some Ho-Chunk syllables contain two vowels. If the two vowels are the same (such as aa), the syllable has a long vowel sound. If the vowels are different (such as ai), then the syllable combines two distinct vowel sounds. Ho-Chunk uses a few symbols not present in English: į and ą are vowels, and ǧ is a consonant.