I've lived in France and think that most French people don't even grasp what syllable stress is. It's an irrelevant concept in French, just as syllable tone in most European languages.
Where are French words stressed?
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Yes or no, he can be right. The apostrophe is not written in French IPA, because when we're reading a single word, for example, "télévision", we can change the stresses, we can put the stress on the beginning or at the end, also, we can pronounce all the syllables in mid tones. Otherwise, we need some stresses in a whole sentence, for exemple, "J'ai regardé la télévision", the "-dé" of "regardé" should be pronounced in a high tone, but the "-sion" of "télévision" can be pronounced with a half-high tone or a mid tone, not very high, because it's not a question. Remember, in the sentence, the important thing is the last syllable of words.Bonjour!
I have this lingering doubt (I hope it is not very stupid). All words of more than one syllable in all languages (or at least I suppose so?) have one syllable that is stressed more than the others. In English, a word's stressed syllable is shown beside the word in the phonetic pronunciation where a mark like an apostrophe appears before the stressed syllable. But in French I have this problem: I don't know which the stressed syllable is because the "apostrophe" doesn't appear in the phonetic pronunciation. I asked a friend who is learning French why this mark is not shown and he told me that it is because all words in French are stressed on the last syllable (?) Is he right? Then, I asked another friend of mine about this and she told me that that wasn't true and she gave as an example that "fenêtre" is not stressed on the last syllable. Do the diacritics indicate where the word is stressed like in Spanish?
Thank you.
This discussion is about stress (that is dynamic stress) and not about tone. Those are different things and only loosely related.
I don't think it's irrelevant, it is just that syllable stress in French is not a property of each word per se but it can be just about anywhere (or nowhere) depending on the context. It is certainly the case that when confronted with a systematically accented foreign language such as English or Latin, most native French speakers seem to be completely at sea as far as accentuation is concerned. This is beautifully illustrated by Poulenc's bizarre accentuation in his wonderful Gloria. (His lau'damus 'te, benedici'mus te is particularly endearing
)They said it was irrelevant (=does not carry any information) in French and that is certainly so.
That is not what "irrelevant" means
Yes, that in exactly what "irrelevant in a language" means. "Irrelevant in a language" is not the same as "irrelevant" per se.
I'd say most if not all medieval samples you find of encor(a) or encar(a) are Aragonese or influence from it.
- In French, the stress is always on the last syllable of isolated words : élé'phant, télépho'ner, générale'ment.
- If the word ends with a so called mute e, it does not form a syllable : é'tud(e), com'prendr(e)
- So, the sound [ə] is seldom stressed, but it can be, for example : dis-'le
- In a sentence, the only stressed words are the ones that come before a pause:
Chaque 'jour, je mange une 'pomm(e).
Chaque 'jour, si je 'peux, je mange une 'pomm(e).
Even a pretty long sentence may be stressed on only one syllable if it is prononced with no pause :
Je mange une pomme bien mûre et bien rouge chaque fois que je peux en cueillir une dans le pom'mier.
In words inherited from latin, the stress syllable is generally the same as in other romance languages. For example, if we compare with spanish:
(un) 'term(e) / ( un) 'término
(je) ter'min(e) / (yo) ter'mino
(il) termi'na / (él) termi'nó
But it is not the case with later borrowings :
gra'cil(e) / 'grácil
This is mostly true in French as well. The particularity of French is that syllables after the stressed one got lost or were deduced to a terminal Schwa and then mostly lost. This is probably why stress eventually become non-phonemic because it became so regular.
Latin derived words like terminer, which seem to defy this rule, are usually re-borrowings and not inherited words.
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Thank you for the English lesson, berndf
We are talking about technical terms in linguistics (phonology to be precise) here. This is not about "English lessons".
Yes, it's relevant, because when there's a stress, it's higher than elsewhere.I don't think it's irrelevant, it is just that syllable stress in French is not a property of each word per se but it can be just about anywhere (or nowhere) depending on the context. It is certainly the case that when confronted with a systematically accented foreign language such as English or Latin, most native French speakers seem to be completely at sea as far as accentuation is concerned. This is beautifully illustrated by Poulenc's bizarre accentuation in his wonderful Gloria. (His lau'damus 'te, benedici'mus te is particularly endearing
Like where? Can you give a word where stress is phonemic? (The topic here is stress and not tone and word stress and not sentence stress.)
I have to note that "phonemic" isn't equal to "relevant". You can speak Russian using the basic allophones of the phonemes only, and you surely will be understood all right, but it would be positively painful to listen to. In Chuvash stress is decided by the phonemic composition of the word and is therefore non-phonemic (basically it falls on the last strong vowel, or, if there is none, on the first weak vowel), but an incorrect stress placement in normal speech would be instantly noted (even though it may happen in poems and songs for the reasons of the rhythm), and so on.
Yes, you are right. It is not necessarily the same.
But as we have seen from the discussion here, native speakers don't perceive syllable stress within a word at all but they do perceive prosodic stress, i.e. the perceive the opposition between Clara and Clara but not between Clara and Clara. The latter is indeed irrelevant.
But as we have seen from the discussion here, native speakers don't perceive syllable stress within a word at all but they do perceive prosodic stress, i.e. the perceive the opposition between Clara and Clara but not between Clara and Clara. The latter is indeed irrelevant.
With all due respect berndf it is not in the usual courteous spirit of this forum for a native German speaker to suggest, even if it were true, that he knows more about the meaning of English words than a native English speaker.
Again, we are not talking about the meaning of a common English word but of a technical term. That is one of the reasons, by scientists usually prefer artificial terms because they avoid such misunderstandings. If common terms or re-used as scientific technical terms they invariably have a narrower meaning than in common language.
Can we end this discussion by defining relevant as shorthand meaning phonologically relevant for the purpose of this discussion.
I had originally equated relevant with phonemically relevant but @Awwal12 had a good point that this might be a bit too narrow, That's why I nor propose the understanding phonologically relevant.
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Here in Italy there's a strong perception of French stressed on the last syllable; this is particular evident with Italian names pronounced by the French: Platinì, Bianchì, and so on.
In Italian, the stress is low or high?
Stress is neither high nor low. Tone is high or low. Those are different things.
The stressed syllable of a word in pausa has a low tone. In non-pausa, the stressed syllable has no phonologically relevant tone.
Swedish phonemically distinguishes high and low tone.
In most European languages, tone distinguishes sentence types and has nothing to do with stress. Rising tone is a comma, strongly rising tone a question mark, falling tone a full stop and strongly falling tone an exclamation mark.
EDIT: The kind of stress we are taking of here is dynamic syllable stress. This is the distinction between more or less forcefully pronounced syllables within a word that can affect the meaning of a word (not in French, though), like in English, where project and project are different words. The former is a noun and the latter is a verb.
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I can say that in Russian tone surely isn't defined by stress, and yet stressed syllables tend to be focal points of intonational patterns, that is, tone has something to do with stress after all. I suppose it's more or less the same in most European languages.
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Yes, tonal information usually coded in stressed syllables. In my language it is the same. The tonal difference between
Das ist eine Dàmpflok!
Ist das eine Dámpflok?
is on Dampf-, the stressed syllable of Dampflok and not on the last syllable of the sentence, i.e on -lok.
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Apologies if someone’s beaten me to it between 2005 and now, but:
France, principally.
They are sometimes stressed in England as well, and maybe even more so
What about a rendezvous in a chateau?
What about a rendezvous in a chateau?
Hi, do French people from Normandie pronounce the word “tempête” with a long and stressed ê?They are sometimes stressed in England as well, and maybe even more so
What about a rendezvous in a chateau?
Do we have long and stressed vowels in French?
We just pronounce it like these 2 guys from Paris and les Vosges, and these people.
We just pronounce it like these 2 guys from Paris and les Vosges, and these people.
According to Warnant, yes, long vowels do exist in French: teillage is pronounced [tɛjaːʒ(ǝ)]. As far as tempête is concerned, there's no long vowel: [tɑ̃pɛt(ǝ)].
At some time in the development of modern French there was phonemically relevant lengthening of the vowel before a lost s and the ^ was more than pure orthographic convention. This manifested in minimal pairs like maître and mettre. I have asked around quite a bit but not found any French person who still maintained this distinction. But in other French speaking regions this distinction might still be alive.
The /ɛ/-/ɛː/ distinction is also alive and well in Belgium, with the distinction usually purely marked by length, except before a nasal where the long vowel gets nasalised (penne /pɛn/ [pɛn] vs. peine /pɛːn/ [pɛ̃ːn]). There's a stigmatised tendency to raise non-nasalised /ɛː/ to [eː] for some speakers (same for the other long mid-low vowels, so that tempête can surface as [tɒ̃ˑpeːt̪], gueule as [ɟøːl] and mode as [moːd̪]).
To come back to stress, length can interact with it in Belgian French, so that the normal phrase-final declarative intoneme (that normally consists of a fast pitch rise in the last few ms of the pretonic syllable then a slow drop over the tonic syllable) can spread over the last two syllables when the penult is long or underlyingly long (= mid-high and nasal vowels), especially when the final is short (say, "aussi", "elle se présentera" or "un détenu"): the pitch rises over the whole long penult then drops over the whole last syllable. This can make the penult seem more prominent than the final syllable.
To come back to stress, length can interact with it in Belgian French, so that the normal phrase-final declarative intoneme (that normally consists of a fast pitch rise in the last few ms of the pretonic syllable then a slow drop over the tonic syllable) can spread over the last two syllables when the penult is long or underlyingly long (= mid-high and nasal vowels), especially when the final is short (say, "aussi", "elle se présentera" or "un détenu"): the pitch rises over the whole long penult then drops over the whole last syllable. This can make the penult seem more prominent than the final syllable.
Fête = fight