"English is a stressed time language, not a syllable-timed language" how appropriate is the title of this discussion?

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التعليقات · 19

"English is a stress-timed language, not a syllable-timed language"

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I was just about to say the same as Su.Ki

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Interesting discussion. However I wouldn’t be so categorical saying that a language is either stress-timed or syllabe-timed. Take Spanish. People from Madrid surely speak in a syllabe timed way. But people from Andalusia ( like the great poet Phil quoted) or from Argentina don’t! Same thing for Italian there are several regional variations.

To my ear English spoken by people from India sounds very syllabe-timed.

When I was studying Spanish on another website than Italki , a teacher from Madrid tried to drill me into pronouncing each syllabe with the same length. She strongly criticized my italian (stress-timed!!!) accent. I wasn’t motivated at all to follow her injonctions.

In English it is apparently important to follow the pattern of stress-timing . The example of the pronunciation of Banana is very eloquent.

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“Peas porridge hot,

Peas porridge cold,

Peas porridge in the pot,

Nine days old.”

Every line has four beats (lines 1, 2, and 4 have a beat on the pause after the final word). The number of syllables between the accented syllables is irrelevant. Obviously, in normal speech, the rhythm will be less “perfect”, but it’s still there. The treatment of secondary stress will vary depending on what’s necessary to fit the rhythm. Line 3 has six syllables, while line 4 has only three.

Spanish, on the other hand, is syllable timed. In the first four lines of Lorca’s Romance Sonámbulo, we see that each line has exactly eight syllables. (Line 3 has an imaginary syllable at the end, since the final word in each line is considered to always have one syllable after the last accented syllable. In line 4, we see that when one word ends in a vowel and the next begins in a vowel, the combination counts as just one syllable.)

“Verde que te quiero verde.

Verde viento. Verdes ramas.

El barco sobre la mar

y el caballo en la montaña.”

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The OP is referring to isochrony. The wikipedia article calls it “postulated”, but in my opinion, the phenomenon is absolutely real and extremely important for language learners. If your native language is Hindi, you’ll definitely want to learn more about it, if you haven’t already. A lot more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony

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