On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 17:21:33 Patrick Moore wrote: > Sorry, but no. Stress as pronounced is described by phonological rules in > the deep structure of a language, if the word is regular. English is > notoriously full of exceptions, irregular words.Try writing some Miltonic > blank verse.
Irregular words are usually either words that have been in the language for millennia (e.g. "be, is, were", which is suppletive) or words borrowed from another language whose inflection is different (e.g. "seraphim"). "Gram" and "meter" were both borrowed from French, which, like English, forms plurals by adding "-s" (but it's usually silent), and which regularly stresses the last syllable of a phrase. Thus stressing "kilometer", but not "millimeter" or "kilogram" or "milligram", on the second syllable is not an explainable irregularity and should be avoided. Spanish does not have regular stress on nouns (it does on verbs, but it moves around, so some forms are always written with accents). This tripped me up when I saw what I called "libelúla", placing the stress where it is in French, instead of "libélula". I had never heard the Spanish for "dragonfly" before. Pierre -- The Black Garden on the Mountain is not on the Black Mountain.
