Stressed Syllables
April 8th, 2006 by MarkI hadn’t really had anything I felt like writing about for a couple of days, but then Mike sent me this email:
Obviously we don’t have accent marks in English. Is
this because we have more complex rules or is there no
way to tell exactly how a word is said based solely on
how it’s written?
Thanks, Mike. Now, I know exactly what I want to write about. There is no way to tell which syllable in an English word is stressed from its written form. Please don’t tell any of my first semester students about that or about the existence of the schwa, though. It would dash their hopes that English phonics is “easy”. I do spend some time teaching intermediate students about stressed syllables, though. There are actually cases in which one spelling maps to two words, which have different syllables stressed and are different parts of speech.
| Verbs | Nouns |
| rejèct | rèject |
| implànt | ìmplant |
| recòrd | rècord |
| objèct | òbject |
| commùne | còmmune |
It’s kind of a neat little phenomenon, but it makes it impossible to know which syllable to stress just from seeing a written word. I’m sure you’ll start to notice many more pairs of words like these, now that you’re aware of them. I’ll save the rest of your email and your second question for the next post.
:
April 8th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
I always tell my students if they don’t know the stress, to just keep it neutral. Neutral stress is less noticeable than misplaced stress.
April 8th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
Since there aren’t any hard and fast rules to use, most of what I do with teaching stresses is make sure they are aware of them, and make sure they know where schwas appear in relation to stressed syllables. For example, I might write “Japàn” and “Jàpanese” on the board and say,
For the first couple of words, I try to use words they’ve already learned, and then I move on to some words I don’t think they’ve heard before. Once the students are aware of this sort of thing, it helps them mimic new words they hear. Obviously, if they read a new word such as “heretic”, they may guess wrong about which syllable is stressed (as did some of my high school classmates in the states).
April 8th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
Mark-san,
That really is confusing for learners of English. To make it a little simple, I always remeber this rule when I forget the right stress: Nouns generally have its stress on the first syllable, and verbs on the second one. There might be some exceptions.
When reading Chinese, I often come across the words which have several readings and tones. Of course, there is no way to tell how to read correctly from its written form. Only books for small children sometimes indicate pinyin under Chinese characters.
In a sense, Japanese is the worst. You can find many kanjis and words with several readings. Japanese words also have accents, but Japanese dictionaries generally do not tell where they are. English and Chinese dictionaries are much kinder to learners.
April 9th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
Stressed syllables are my nightmare at the moment. Even if you are a native speaker, using them precisely enough to write poetry in meter is really hard… I’m still hoping that somewhere on the Internet there is a list of English’s stressed and unstressed syllables, even if it is just a rough guide.
It’s also, by the way, another of the differences between British and American English - a lot of two syllable words have the stress in different places.
April 9th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
Hahaha, that reminds me of an Australian poem. In that poem, “laugh” and “scarf” were a rhyming pair… but I didn’t realize it until until my friends explicitly told me so.
Can’t you “take poetic licence” and change intonation where necessary?
April 12th, 2006 at 11:40 am
Scarf - haha, that’s true. You also have the issue that in older English poetry, you can see that they pronunced -try (as in symmetry) as “try” rather than “tree”, which makes stuff by Blake and Shakespeare occasionally sound very weird.
You can decide how you personally intone (intonate) things, and you shouldn’t follow the rhythm of iambic pentatmeter all the time - Shakespeare definitely doesn’t (”O that this too too solid flesh…”)
The problem is that if you are doing it right, the rhythm is very real. You can’t not hear it even if you don’t know it’s there or you wish it wasn’t. Often I’ll write a line which looks good on paper, but read aloud it sounds terrible. So I’m left working out stresses as I go, and never quite sure what works until later. Some kind of dictionary of stress would just make the process a little simpler….
Daniel
November 25th, 2007 at 4:19 am
I find stressed syllables harder when trying to write in anapaestic style. when i read someone elses try at it anapaestic style, i understand how it is that…but when making my own i can’t get it to always do two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one. i was going to try and write a poem using it all the way through but it is hard. its hard to remember what the stressed syllable should be etc.
do you get what i am trying to say lol?