Accenting Syllables?

Carcano

Valued Senior Member
I have a question about how Greek and Japanese speakers verbalize multi syllable words...like Lysimachos or Yokohama.

Do they always emphasize the second syllable with a slightly higher pitch, or is there some other rule for 3-4 syllable words?
 
I have a question about how Greek and Japanese speakers verbalize multi syllable words...like Lysimachos or Yokohama. Do they always emphasize the second syllable with a slightly higher pitch, or is there some other rule for 3-4 syllable words?
I'm not an expert on Greek, but it seems that most of their words are accented either on the penult, the next-to-last syllable, or the antepenult, the one before that. Thus we have Greek words like hy-po-THET-ic-al.

So you have to count back from the last syllable, not forward from the first one. You're thinking in the paradigm of English and the other Germanic languages, in which (native) words are accented on the first syllable, no matter how long they are, or sometimes the second syllable if the first one is a prefix like for- or be-.

Czech also accents the first syllable, without exception. But in many other languages the accent is closer to the end of the word. French accents the last syllable without exception. In most of the other Romance languages the accent is usually on the next-to-last (the penult), but with rampant exceptions.

As for Japanese, you have to rethink the definition of a "word." Most Japanese words are compounds of one-, two-, or occasionally three-syllable root words. The root words are always accented on the first syllable.

Yokohama = yoko hama, "beside (the) shore." So it's pronounced YO-ko-HA-ma.

Toyota = toyo ta, "rich field." So it's pronounced TO-yo-TA.

Ogawa = o kawa, "big river." So it's pronounced O-GA-wa.
 
Yokohama = yoko hama, "beside (the) shore." So it's pronounced YO-ko-HA-ma.

Toyota = toyo ta, "rich field." So it's pronounced TO-yo-TA.
English speakers usually say...to-YO-ta...yes?

I would have thought the Japanese would say...yo-KO-ha-ma...because this is the way ancient Greek words are usually spoken.

Artemis for example is a Greek name...ar-TE-mis.

The second syllable is accented with a slightly higher pitch.

Same goes for a name like Agathocles...a-GA-tho-cles.
 
English speakers usually say...to-YO-ta...yes?
Yes, but we mangle foreign words pretty badly. We pronounce the French words chaise longue as if the second word were spelled "lounge." It's "shaze long".
I would have thought the Japanese would say...yo-KO-ha-ma...because this is the way ancient Greek words are usually spoken.
Japanese and Greek are not related. As I mentioned, yoko and hama are both individual words and they retain their accent when shoved together to form a name. We also say SU-zu-KI incorrectly.
 
I have a question about how Greek and Japanese speakers verbalize multi syllable words...like Lysimachos or Yokohama.

Do they always emphasize the second syllable with a slightly higher pitch, or is there some other rule for 3-4 syllable words?

You might find these links useful:

Some languages have fixed stress. That is, stress is placed always on a given syllable, as in Finnish and Hungarian (stress always on the first syllable) or Quechua and Polish (stress always on the penult: one syllable before the last) or on third syllable counting backwards (the antepenult), as in Macedonian (see: Stress in Macedonian language). Other languages have stress placed on different syllables but in a predictable way, as in Classical Arabic and Latin (where stress is conditioned by the structure of the penultimate syllable). They are said to have a regular stress rule.

French words are sometimes said to be stressed on the final syllable, but actually French has no word stress at all. Rather, it has a prosody whereby the final or next-to-final syllable of a string of words is stressed. This string may be equivalent to a clause or a phrase. However, when a word is said alone, it receives the full prosody and therefore the stress as well.

There are also languages like English, Italian, Russian and Spanish, where stress is (at least partly) unpredictable. Rather, it is lexical: it comes as part of the word and must be memorized, although orthography can make stress unambiguous for a reader, as is the case in Spanish and Portuguese. In such languages, otherwise homophonous words may differ only by the position of the stress (e.g. incite and insight in English), and therefore it is possible to use stress as a grammatical device.

English does this to some extent with noun-verb pairs such as a récord vs. to recórd, where the verb is stressed on the last syllable and the related noun is stressed on the first; record also hyphenates differently: a réc-ord vs. to re-córd. The German language does this with certain prefixes – for example úm-schrei-ben (to rewrite) vs. um-schréi-ben (to paraphrase, outline) – and in Russian this phenomenon often occurs with different cases of certain nouns (земли́/zemli (genitive case of the Earth, land or soil) and зе́мли (soils or lands – plural form)).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(linguistics)

And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_accent.
 
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