That's counting a claimed New Zealand pronunciation of "ˈdæ̝ɪn.d͡ʒə", which does split the first syllable in two. Can't attest to that particular one, but Wiktionary will try to capture different ways of pronouncing words across major variants.
Edit: Wait, that shouldn't create a new syllable. Now I'll need to investigate instead of just being confidently wrong.
well - today I learned. I knew "putrescent", I'd just been saying it with stress on the wrong syllable. Thanks!
To be fair, from the linked pronunciation example, putrescent doesn't sound so wrong at all, while quintessence sounds really very very wrong :D We do have Quintessenz in German which is stressed on the first syllable, so that's probably why.
Coming from two latin words, combined into one, I'd argue both languages got it wrong, because the first two syllables should both have equal stress.
When I started listening to lots of audiobooks and podcasts in English, I discovered that many words have the stress further than I've thought from reading them.
Pronouns are the last bastion of inflection in English, and it's fun to see English-speakers being perpetually confused about them. Namely about ‘I’/‘me’ and ‘who’/‘whom’. Since the word order and particles already handle the meaning of sentences, people don't quite know why they need to modify the pronouns too. And don't have the vocabulary for the rules, as grammatical cases are long forgotten.
Ehh... I like the spirit of this, but it's not quite as immalleable as they say. You can have green great dragons if "great dragons" are a distinct thing from simply dragons. Like how in Game of Thrones, you'd say Ghost is a "white dire wolf", not a "dire white wolf".
Yeah, that's just an open compound word, like "emperor penguin" or "hammerhead shark." We have open compounds where the component words are separated by a space, hyphenated compounds (not super common with animals but can be seen in words like "mother-in-law") where the words are separated by a hyphen, and closed compounds that just stick the two words together ("kingfisher," "anteater").
The category order is generally more rigid toward the right half of the adjective list. So you could have an old thin bread knife or a thin old bread knife, but not an old bread thin knife.
"Un-fucking-believable" is standard usage, but "unbe-fucking-lievable" still works as an alternate. That's when you're down to artistic judgment and choosing which form fits your case best. Mixing it up and using something unexpected is a good way to provide emphasis.
There’s a morpheme boundary here, probably has something to do with it. The examples in the post have no morpheme boundary before the main stress, or at least not one that’s transparent to English speakers (ab/solu/te/ly might hypothetically have been more transparent to a Latin speaker though)
in Spanish you have stressed qué/cómo and normal que/como etc. they are pronounced the same as the difference is in grammar (please don’t ask me for details)
in order to know whether is has the tilde (accent) on the vowel, you can use a similar rule:
if you can put cojones (literally balls, but translates to what the fuck/how the fuck) after it, then it’s with a tilde.
although it’s not a 100% reliable, more details here:
I think i just found my answer on Wikipedia, in Spanish specifically, diaceitic marks as a group are referred to as tildes. And the name for the mark above ñ is a virgulila. Also, interestingly, ñ is considered a distinct letter from n, (as opposed to being an 'n' with an added accent) which i didnt realize....
In english (and similarly in french) an accent refers to any of that group of 'characters,' which are commonly referred to as 'glyphs',differentiating them from characters, which would be whole letters that can be used independently) (which i think is what graficos is translating to) known as accent marks, aka diacritics.
so á is an 'accute accent mark' (l'accent aigu in Fr) à is an grave accent, â is called a circumflex / accent circomflex
and ä is an Umlaut/ trema.
Like those last 2, the ñ is not referred to as 'accent tilde' just as 'tilde' (which to me seems fine for the others, but not the ~ because theres no other commonly used character by that name to need to disambiguation from)
My problem was that when I took linguistics in college, I was also taking logic. To when the linguistics teacher referred to 'ñ' in english, he called 'tilde n' which was exactly the same phrase the logic professor would use to refer to ~N, aka 'not N'.
Making me constantly leap to 'any letter but N,' or 'a theoretical negative/ converse of N'
ñ is considered a distinct letter from n, (as opposed to being an 'n' with an added accent) which i didnt realize
Yep, it's part of the alphabet. N (enn) then Ñ (ennyay). Also fun fact the alphabet is sometimes called the abecedario which is an amazing term IMO. It's like a pun with the first four letters. ABCDario
Spanish also uses Ü! But it's not a letter on its own.
We spent a solid week talking about fucking infixation in morphology class back in undergrad.
I can assure you that the rule on the slide is absofuckinglutly wrong. English speakers are remarkably consistent about how they do fucking infixation. Somehow, they all understand prosodic feet better than a room full of linguistics majors that just spent a week learning about it.
It's obvious to native speakers, but when you're new to it and trying to learn the cadence to help make sense of spoken language, rules like these help
It's a descriptive rule, not a prescriptive rule, and likely one snuck into the powerpoint to try and get the class thinking and laughing. Like calling the descriptions of gravity the "laws of gravity", it describes something about the world we've seen, but there's no Physics Police enforcing all matter follow the "Laws" - it's just the term we use for a description of how things work.
A lot of advanced English classes are much more on the descriptivist side of things - observing patterns in ways we use language - than the prescriptivist approach we get in grade school where we're just learning rote things like spellings.
I forget what the grammatical name for that kind of insertion is, but there is one. There's a ton of rules for writing and speaking English that aren't taught in regular school at all.
67 Comments
Gork@sopuli.xyz · 83 pts · 164d
Rhi fuckin nocerous
Ambi fuckin dexterous
Po fuckin tay fuckin toes
DahGangalang@infosec.pub · 29 pts · 164d
Whoa, these Po and Tay people sound wild if they're fucking each other while also fucking toes.
prettybunnys@piefed.social · 10 pts · 164d
Rhino fuckin cerous
Master@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 162d
I didnt believe in the rule until you showed me it was true.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world · 44 pts · 164d
Here's Wiktionary's category for 3-syllable English words in case anyone wants to get creative.
Edit: I'd argue "adultery" is doable but difficult, because it almost inherently sounds like you're saying three words: "a fucking dultery".
Edit 2: "the pu-fucking-trescence" might be my new favorite way to describe a terrible odor. It's so extra.
fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk · 9 pts · 164d
I think there's some imposters on that list, else I'm stuck trying to work put how I'd pronounce "danger" with three syllables.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 164d
That's counting a claimed New Zealand pronunciation of "ˈdæ̝ɪn.d͡ʒə", which does split the first syllable in two. Can't attest to that particular one, but Wiktionary will try to capture different ways of pronouncing words across major variants.
Edit: Wait, that shouldn't create a new syllable. Now I'll need to investigate instead of just being confidently wrong.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 9 pts · 164d
I thought elvish was fake, but apparently they do actually use it in NZ
deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz · 3 pts · 164d
We looked at the most egregious American and rural English village pronunciations and went "huld muh burr..."
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 164d
Oof! Hate it when that happens!
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 164d
I'd argue putrescence is emphasized on the first syllable. But then I'm not a native speaker, so... But Putrescence sounds quite wrong to me.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 164d
Yeah, it comes from "putrescent" which has a stressed second syllable. "Quintessence" is a close sibling structurally if that one's less off-putting.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 164d
well - today I learned. I knew "putrescent", I'd just been saying it with stress on the wrong syllable. Thanks!
To be fair, from the linked pronunciation example, putrescent doesn't sound so wrong at all, while quintessence sounds really very very wrong :D We do have Quintessenz in German which is stressed on the first syllable, so that's probably why. Coming from two latin words, combined into one, I'd argue both languages got it wrong, because the first two syllables should both have equal stress.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 163d
When I started listening to lots of audiobooks and podcasts in English, I discovered that many words have the stress further than I've thought from reading them.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world · 34 pts · 164d
Gork@sopuli.xyz · 14 pts · 164d
This is why we don't have to conjugate our verbs, we make up for it with this very strict word order.
It's also probably why English as a Second Language is so difficult aside from the inconsistencies and exceptions.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 164d
Pronouns are the last bastion of inflection in English, and it's fun to see English-speakers being perpetually confused about them. Namely about ‘I’/‘me’ and ‘who’/‘whom’. Since the word order and particles already handle the meaning of sentences, people don't quite know why they need to modify the pronouns too. And don't have the vocabulary for the rules, as grammatical cases are long forgotten.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 163d
Plurals and the few gendered nouns we have left (actor/actress), also count as declension
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 163d
Well, the plurals are simple, just slap an apostrophe and ‘s’ in there.
Apeman42@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 164d
Ehh... I like the spirit of this, but it's not quite as immalleable as they say. You can have green great dragons if "great dragons" are a distinct thing from simply dragons. Like how in Game of Thrones, you'd say Ghost is a "white dire wolf", not a "dire white wolf".
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca · 22 pts · 164d
in that case, "great dragon" is the noun, and is consistent with the proposed rule
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 9 pts · 164d
Yeah, that's just an open compound word, like "emperor penguin" or "hammerhead shark." We have open compounds where the component words are separated by a space, hyphenated compounds (not super common with animals but can be seen in words like "mother-in-law") where the words are separated by a hyphen, and closed compounds that just stick the two words together ("kingfisher," "anteater").
spacesatan@leminal.space · 3 pts · 163d
I feel like most of this can be flexible, especially origin or if you want to emphasize something.
You could have a little Italian green knife. Or a copper French knife.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 163d
That immediately sounds like ‘green knife’ and ‘French knife’ are some special kinds of knives, not just what they look like and where they're from.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 163d
The category order is generally more rigid toward the right half of the adjective list. So you could have an old thin bread knife or a thin old bread knife, but not an old bread thin knife.
KenOh@feddit.online · 22 pts · 164d
Un-fucking-believable breaks this.
0ops@piefed.zip · 24 pts · 164d
Unbe-fucking-lievable
MoffKalast@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 164d
Ngl that still works
spinne@sh.itjust.works · 11 pts · 164d
"Un-fucking-believable" is standard usage, but "unbe-fucking-lievable" still works as an alternate. That's when you're down to artistic judgment and choosing which form fits your case best. Mixing it up and using something unexpected is a good way to provide emphasis.
ytg@sopuli.xyz · 5 pts · 164d
There’s a morpheme boundary here, probably has something to do with it. The examples in the post have no morpheme boundary before the main stress, or at least not one that’s transparent to English speakers (ab/solu/te/ly might hypothetically have been more transparent to a Latin speaker though)
tabarnaski@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 163d
I'd hypothesise that you can insert fucking either between the prefix and the root, or before a stressed vowel.
EDIT: Expletive infixation - Wikipedia https://share.google/broCNIxOgtnKUPvSv
e8CArkcAuLE@piefed.social · 17 pts · 164d
in Spanish you have stressed qué/cómo and normal que/como etc. they are pronounced the same as the difference is in grammar (please don’t ask me for details)
in order to know whether is has the tilde (accent) on the vowel, you can use a similar rule:
if you can put cojones (literally balls, but translates to what the fuck/how the fuck) after it, then it’s with a tilde.
although it’s not a 100% reliable, more details here:
https://spanish.stackexchange.com/questions/23322/fiabilidad-de-la-regla-de-poner-cojones-tras-que-qu%C3%A9-para-saber-si-lleva-tilde
axexrx@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 164d
Its alsways bothered me a bit that its called a tilde both when its above a letter or on its own Ñ / ~
e8CArkcAuLE@piefed.social · 0 pts · 164d
apparently you can say acento (gráfico) but it’s not common, at least in Spain and Argentina.
https://spanish.stackexchange.com/questions/21844/es-correcto-llamar-acento-a-una-tilde
axexrx@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 164d
I think i just found my answer on Wikipedia, in Spanish specifically, diaceitic marks as a group are referred to as tildes. And the name for the mark above ñ is a virgulila. Also, interestingly, ñ is considered a distinct letter from n, (as opposed to being an 'n' with an added accent) which i didnt realize....
In english (and similarly in french) an accent refers to any of that group of 'characters,' which are commonly referred to as 'glyphs',differentiating them from characters, which would be whole letters that can be used independently) (which i think is what graficos is translating to) known as accent marks, aka diacritics.
so á is an 'accute accent mark' (l'accent aigu in Fr) à is an grave accent, â is called a circumflex / accent circomflex
and ä is an Umlaut/ trema.
Like those last 2, the ñ is not referred to as 'accent tilde' just as 'tilde' (which to me seems fine for the others, but not the ~ because theres no other commonly used character by that name to need to disambiguation from)
My problem was that when I took linguistics in college, I was also taking logic. To when the linguistics teacher referred to 'ñ' in english, he called 'tilde n' which was exactly the same phrase the logic professor would use to refer to ~N, aka 'not N'.
Making me constantly leap to 'any letter but N,' or 'a theoretical negative/ converse of N'
bdonvr@thelemmy.club · 2 pts · 164d
Yep, it's part of the alphabet. N (enn) then Ñ (ennyay). Also fun fact the alphabet is sometimes called the abecedario which is an amazing term IMO. It's like a pun with the first four letters. ABCDario
Spanish also uses Ü! But it's not a letter on its own.
spinne@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 164d
These are the tips language learners like me rely on
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 164d
Phil - Fuckin - Adelphia.
And Adelphia's dad just went to get his gun.
monkeyslikebananas2@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 164d
Philadelphi - Fuckin - A
glorkon@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 164d
Fun fact: Eddie Izzard once came to Berlin and did comedy gigs in German language. My favourite creation of his: Ausgefuckingzeichnet!
AMillionMonkeys@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 164d
FYI: Inserting a word in another word like this is known as "tmesis".
caradenada@feddit.cl · 10 pts · 164d
They should've named it something self-referential like "inwordsertion" but less lame.
mech@feddit.org · 9 pts · 163d
Unfuckingbelievable!
Kolanaki@pawb.social · 7 pts · 164d
Straw-fuckin-berry.
osanna@lemmy.vg · 2 pts · 163d
strawber-fuckin-ry
peteypete420@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 164d
As a philly boy i gotta say, iv never heard it prounounced that way.
ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 164d
Fanta Fucking Stic.
Hmm...
rustyricotta@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 10 pts · 164d
TA is the stressed syllable here. Fan fucking tastic This one is actually commonly said
mech@feddit.org · 2 pts · 163d
I don't like this new Fanta flavor
homura1650@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 163d
We spent a solid week talking about fucking infixation in morphology class back in undergrad.
I can assure you that the rule on the slide is absofuckinglutly wrong. English speakers are remarkably consistent about how they do fucking infixation. Somehow, they all understand prosodic feet better than a room full of linguistics majors that just spent a week learning about it.
Ghostie@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 163d
nonentity@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 164d
So the syllable needs to be edging before the fucking insertion.
Dry_Monk@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 163d
There's actually a word for this!
Tmesis Tmesis is a rhetorical device where a word is split into two parts with another word inserted between them, often for emphasis or comic effect.
Janx@piefed.social · 4 pts · 164d
I don't know if I trust a "rule" written in Comic Sans.
OddMinus1@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 164d
Abso-no-fucking-lutely way
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 164d
Do we need a rule for this? I mean, incred-fukin-ible just doesn't work. That's pretty obvious.
spinne@sh.itjust.works · 16 pts · 164d
It's obvious to native speakers, but when you're new to it and trying to learn the cadence to help make sense of spoken language, rules like these help
Westcoastdg@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 164d
I would argue it's actually in fuckin credible, which does work
marzhall@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 164d
It's a descriptive rule, not a prescriptive rule, and likely one snuck into the powerpoint to try and get the class thinking and laughing. Like calling the descriptions of gravity the "laws of gravity", it describes something about the world we've seen, but there's no Physics Police enforcing all matter follow the "Laws" - it's just the term we use for a description of how things work.
A lot of advanced English classes are much more on the descriptivist side of things - observing patterns in ways we use language - than the prescriptivist approach we get in grade school where we're just learning rote things like spellings.
Triumph@fedia.io · 3 pts · 164d
I forget what the grammatical name for that kind of insertion is, but there is one. There's a ton of rules for writing and speaking English that aren't taught in regular school at all.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 164d
that assumes you are speaking in iambic and I have issues with that assumption
Arkhive@piefed.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 163d
Go Birds!
tabarnaski@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 163d
Phonology! My old friend!
Psythik@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 163d
Pho-fuckin-nology
just_an_average_joe@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 163d
Nah, phono-fuckin-logy sounds more correct
Ferroto@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 164d
Ricky would ace this course.
qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 164d
What if you say it with an Italian accent? It'sa me, Philadel-fucking-phia!
BonkTheAnnoyed@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 164d
Awesome! Now express it in a T-rule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar