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Initial Stress-Derived Noun
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 542458 5y agoOne thing that is a bit amazing to me is that there are all sorts of absolutely bonkers rules to English that 99% of people can’t describe, but do subconsciously anyways. Things like the order of adjectives (“big red ball” sounds right, “red big ball” sounds wrong) are surprisingly complicated [1], but we passively learn them at a young age. [1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adj...
- eru 5y agoAbout the 'red big ball': you can use that, but the weirdness itself suggests that you better mean something different than an ordinary big red ball with that phrase. Also interesting and surprisingly rule-bound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive_infixation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive_infixation
- jpxw 5y ago> Although most speakers are not exposed to these formations until after childhood,[citation needed] Lol at “citation needed”
- SilasX 5y ago“Give me one of the big balls.” <gives purple ball> “Wait, I actually need a red big ball.”
- treeman79 5y agoGave giant balls two pink to kids. One was slightly larger then the other. Life Lesson, either both must be identical, or don’t get.
- msbarnett 5y agoit works but even then, “no sorry, I decided I need the big red ball” feels more natural to me.
- presentation 5y agoOr if a "Big Ball" is a thing, like a brand name lol.
- SilasX 5y agoExactly. My personal hunch is that the supposed "required ordering" of adjectives isn't real, and the real "rule" is related to the tightness by which the adjectives are bound to the noun -- least separable go last. It's just that, in practice the semantic tightness corresponds to that rule. In the extreme case (like you gave) where "BigBall(tm)" is an irreducible thing it itself, then of course "big" goes last.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoThats seems more like a arbitrary cultural distinction versus a rule. It sounds odd, but a half second of thought should make it obvious it makes perfect sense.
- eru 5y agoWhat's the difference between 'arbitrary cultural distinction' and 'rule of a language'?
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoRADAR vs radar. Acronyms should be all upper case. But no one really cares for words that have entered common languge
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bobthepanda 5y agoThe dictionaries we have (Oxford, Merriam-Webster etc.) are all descriptive rather than prescriptive.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y agoI mean true but this is like pointing out that no one plays baseball with a golf club. One is ubiquitous because it's useful and the other isn't. Prescriptive dictionaries do exist but they're mostly used by specialists to understand specific usages within a time-limited context like "what did 'gay' mean in 1920s california" etc. Similarly there might possibly be some training reason to try to hit a baseball with a golf club. But if that applies to you you're probably aware of it.
- lupire 5y ago> understand specific usages within a time-limited context That sounds descriptive to me.
- thechao 5y agoYeah; I first heard about this from a German speaker who was complaining about it. He said that you could mangle 99% of English Grammar — no problem. But! you get the order-of-adjectives slightly wrong, and a native English speaker will look at you like you're from Mars. His second complaint is that the rule is rarely taught to native English speakers, such that they (we) don't even know how hard of a rule it is.
- seppel 5y agoGerman has more as less exactly the same order in which adjectives are sorted (unless you want to put stress on any particular adjective).
- marcosdumay 5y agoThat's a problem itself already. On a lot of languages, the order of the words can change a lot depending on what you want to stress, but English gives you very little leeway. Thus if you try to apply your skill of ordering the words right to express yourself, you will fail almost every time.
- kleton 5y agoAll languages have either exactly the same adjective order as English, or exactly reversed.
- obloid 5y agoI've recently been listening to the "History of English Podcast". It's a deep dive into the evolution of the English language starting from its PIE roots onward. He does a great job explaining how many of the the odd rules of English came about. Highly recommended if you're into that kind of thing.
- Tagbert 5y ago"History of English Podcast" is fantastic look at both language and the historic and cultural events that impact the language. “Lexicon Valley” is another language focused podcast that looks at how our use of language has changed over time.
- eternauta3k 5y agoBoth are excellent podcasts. I personally prefer the early Lexicon Valley episodes with the original hosts, although I hear the new host has more credentials.
- gumby 5y agoThis is true of every language.
- foobiekr 5y agoI took 4+ years of Japanese and was once nearly fluent; I never came across an equivalent there; the closest I can think of is an emphasis rule, which is not at all what's going on in English. Spanish (several years) seems very loose compared to english, but I agree it shows up there in a way that I never quite nailed (e.g., "el frio hielo"). I am curious if you can point to some article about this being a universal.
- gumby 5y agoI didn't mean the stress issue (stress in Japanese is a completely different matter anyway) but the general principle of complex-to-write-down "rules" that are not taught explicitly to native speakers but which people automatically adopt. Classifiers are a common example; words are often taught with classifiers (in most IE languages, gender) but you pick up words in reading or speech and automatically absorb the appropriate classifier even if not used, from other syntactic agreements. Japanese of course has a richer set than gender. In another case: German, how you compose compound words (and far more interesting to me, how you read unfamiliar ones at a glance rather than parsing them as a student would) uses rules that just "feel obvious" after a while. You a fast learner. It usually takes me several years of daily, primary use of a language before these kinds of things are intuitive.
- Clewza313 5y agoThe basic order seems similar in Japanese as well though, although it's a lot more loose. A big red ball would default to ookina akai booru. Akakute ookii booru isn't wrong, but it shifts the emphasis to "red" over "big". Then again, Japanese adjectives don't behave very much English adjectives, keiyoushi (-i) conjugate much like verbs while keiyoudoushi (-na) are basically nouns with syntactic glue tacked on.
- presentation 5y ago
- Razengan 5y ago> there are all sorts of absolutely bonkers rules to English that 99% of people can’t describe It’s especially annoying when English natives arrogantly deride other languages for being too complicated or ambiguous. Like, buddy, do you even know how many different ways are to just pronounce one letter in English?? (e.g. “Pacific Ocean” or “ghoti” = “fish”)
- chimeracoder 5y ago> Like, buddy, do you even know how many different ways are to just pronounce one letter in English?? (e.g. “Pacific Ocean” or “ghoti” = “fish”) That's hardly unique to English. Heck, even in German, there are at least four ways to pronounce the letter "s".
- Razengan 5y agoThat’s pretty much the point.
- loceng 5y agoWell, evolutionary-hierarchy perspective wise colour would be the best/simplest identifier and ideal to be first.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- swayvil 5y agoI'll bet a lot of them aren't even rules, just conventions. I mean, there might not be a governing intelligent abstraction there. Just inertia.
- cecilpl2 5y agoReposting a comment I wrote a couple days which surprisingly is on-topic once again! Multiple adjectives always have to be in the order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, or a beautiful big new oval blue nylon sleeping bag. Those sound completely natural and intuitive, but any tweak to the order just sounds "wrong" to a native speaker. Try it! If you have a "cardboard brown box", it sounds like the box is the color "cardboard-brown"! If you have an old little knife, it sounds like "little knife" is the kind of knife it is! Other tweaks change the implied meaning in a way that is completely opaque to a non-native speaker. Why can't you have a "green rectangular French old silver little whittling lovely knife"?
- gerdesj 5y ago"lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife" These are the groupings of those adjectives that make soundly sense to me: lovely, little, old rectangular, green, French silver, whittling knife (final noun) You can mix up all the adjectives and still get the meaning but it does sound wrong. The example you give causes me to try to create the word "Frenchly" (an adverb) to fix it up. I think that we would not normally try to describe an object in one stream of adjectives like that. I think we have a series of sets of adjectives that are deployed as required. Attempting to come up with a final rule that covers all eventualities is unlikely to work. I've got a lovely little old French whittling knife. It's made of silver yet green in colour due to [something]. It is rectangular which is a right old pain when cutting [something]. There is a set of rules here somewhere but it isn't quite as simple as all English adjectives can be deployed as: "opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose."
- egeozcan 5y agonormally Turkish grammar is a world apart from the English grammar but somehow this one fits 100%. büyük kırmızı top ("big red ball") sounds right, kırmızı büyük top ("red big ball") sounds wrong (feels like "red" is describing the word "big", nor sure why).
- barney54 5y agoAs a native English speaker, I had no idea about this rule. It’s good to learn something new about the language I speak everyday.
- kevin_b_er 5y agoI recognized this was a thing, but didn't have a name for it. So putting a name to it is neat.
- mrec 5y agoIf you find this sort of thing interesting, I can highly recommend Steven Pinker's Words and Rules.
- dhosek 5y agoI remember working this out in sixth grade while I was bored out of my skull in language arts class. I brought it up to the teacher and she had apparently never noticed it.
- GavinMcG 5y agoSome of the examples in the list seem dubious to me. Absent? Cushion? Recap? I don't think I've ever heard the stress on the latter syllable even when used as a verb.
- asplake 5y agoI absent myself from this discussion
- GavinMcG 5y agoYes, that is indeed the verb, but I hear it as "I absent myself" and I can't remember ever hearing it otherwise. Maybe in the USA it's already entered this category and then gone even further and influenced the pronunciation of the verb.
- asplake 5y agoI’m UK-based (English, specifically) and definitely hear it on the second syllable in that usage
- Epenthesis 5y agoAmerican English speaker here, born and raised in Dallas, Tx. The stress goes on the second syllable for the verb for me ("I absent myself").
- spzb 5y agoI've certainly heard "abSENT" in British English. The other two, not so much.
- obloid 5y agoI was going to comment the same thing. While many on the list follow the rule many other words listed I've heard only one pronunciation regardless noun and verb form. Maybe it's a regional thing. I speak American English, maybe these pronunciations are different elsewhere.
- dqv 5y ago
- mikelward 5y agoNo wonder it irritates me when some Americans say "duhtail" rather than "deetail" as a noun. They're doing the stress backwards according to this rule.
- mikelward 5y agoAnd on the other hand, now I understand why Americans say "address" rather than "uhdress" for the noun. I should probably do the same.
- pithon 5y agoIt sounds strange when my colleagues refer to a class in Python having an a-TRIB-ute rather than an ATT-tri-bute. I'm familiar with the verb form stressing the middle syllable and the noun form stressing the first.
- mikelward 5y agoYes. They're doing it wrong according to this rule.
- stevula 5y agoI hear this pronunciation every now and then from gamers too. I suspect this happens when people learn the word from reading instead of from listening to the speech of their peers. If it becomes common enough then it spreads via speech patterns too.
- montecarl 5y agoThe outro on MC Frontalot's Charisma Potion covers this! https://open.spotify.com/track/21HeW6fxCl02b3gcvf1TIC?si=9fbf82c95b8944a8 https://open.spotify.com/track/21HeW6fxCl02b3gcvf1TIC?si=9fb...
- tomerv 5y agoSpeaking of python, how do you pronounce "import"? I pronounce it as IM-port. According to the rule that makes it a noun, but shouldn't it be a verb? I wonder if I'm pronouncing it correctly.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- barrucadu 5y agoBritish English speaker: import foo "im-PORT foo" "foo is an IM-port" "this code im-PORTs foo"
- dhosek 5y agoWhen you use it as a verb it should have the stress on the second syllable, /imˈpôrt/ as a verb, /ˈimˌpôrt/ as a noun. It's probably one of the more common mispronunciations. The number one mispronunciation, though, has to be “often” (look it up). With forte, meaning strength, as number two.
- faichai 5y agoIf any non-British wonder why we Brits don’t know the rules, well back when I was at school, studying GCSE English in the 90s (qualifications we get age 16), they explicitly didn’t teach us grammar rules, at all, just made us write stories. It was a bit of an experiment that I think they have since reversed. This meant that I knew rules of French grammar more explicitly than English. Which is nuts.
- quxkgpdy 5y agoWhy is it nuts? Being fluent is all about implicit knowledge. > we Brits don’t know the rules Every native speaker of English in Britain knows the rules - implicitly. Which should be good enough for non-linguists.
- jessedhillon 5y agoThis is true for native speakers of most languages, in my experience. I remember many years ago traveling Spanish-speaking countries and trying to talk to locals about some grammatical point, like use of the subjunctive mood, and getting very puzzled looks. This despite the fact that even three-year old children correctly navigate verb moods without knowing the rules. This and other experiences convinced me that learning the formal rules of a language is perhaps not the best way to approach learning. Especially not if your intention is to speak to locals, rather than say, become a TV news announcer. I think the most critical skill of language learning is to get the "muscle memory" of the language, the reflex of subconsciously mapping concepts to words in your internal lookup table. This skill is even precedes IMO listening comprehension: naturally, when you're listening to someone speak, you'll miss words. But if your mastery of the language is sufficient to allow you to quickly guess what you would have said in the gap if you were speaking, then the error is survivable. I find that this seems to be how the brain works when listening to speech in your native language. To correlate with Dan Ariely's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" it's the fast mode that's needed, whereas as a grammatical approach tends to emphasize and develop slow mode skills. Sometimes you need to go slow before you go fast, but given that children jump I without knowing the rules, I don't think it's necessary for language. (I also think too much is made about the supposed inelasticity of the adult brain re languages) I hope/expect with AI, there is a really interesting possibility around the corner for learning language in a simulated immersion environment. The Google and Amazon translation APIs seem, on paper, to provide at least 50% of what that would take.
- ammar_x 5y agoFirst time I hear of this as a non-native speaker. I'll pay more attention to notice it in real life.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoThe number of things we take for granted in languages, without really noticing them as a native or familiar speaker, is astounding. I remember being asked by someone who was speaking my native language as his second language. I believe the words he chose were correct, maybe even in the correct form and all, but I simply couldn't understand him due to slight differences in pronunciation and intonation. Now, I sometimes get asked to explain concepts of my native language (e.g. which endings to choose for a word) and more often than not, my response is "wow, thanks for making me realize what an impossible mess that is - even understanding the grammatical concepts behind this, I have no idea how to reasonably explain this. This is a mess, and nobody should have to learn that language, ever."
- mistermann 5y ago> The number of things we take for granted in languages, without really noticing them as a native or familiar speaker, is astounding. And this is just the parsing and cognition of language, now imagine what goes on in the perception of reality itself (of which language processing is but one component), which is far more complex and less understood than language. And yet, we literally run our world upon this flawed (to a degree which we haven't the slightest idea) system, and seem to think nothing of it, if not worse.
- spidersouris 5y ago> And yet, we literally run our world upon this flawed (to a degree which we haven't the slightest idea) system, and seem to think nothing of it, if not worse. Can you elaborate? Do you think there should be another "system" replacing it? A uniformization? In what ways?
- mistermann 5y agoI believe there should, or at the very least that it is an idea worth spending some "collective compute" upon. Have you ever noticed this pattern in reality where the same ideas get discussed (here and elsewhere) repeatedly, and each iteration of the discussion of a topic has large similarities across many dimensions? For example, many of the same facts, ideas, perspectives (with all their historic imperfections) can be found within each iteration of a discussion, perhaps with some new variations here and there depending on some event that has occurred. Some of these conversations have been going on for decades, if not centuries! As a thought experiment, imagine the existence of a system where there is only one "thread" per topic, and a "critical mass" of sufficiently intelligent, knowledgeable, and diverse (etc, etc) users exist who discuss the topic on an ongoing basis within this thread, such that knowledge accumulates over time, and repetition/etc is largely eliminated. Also imagine that when and where you identify architectural flaws in this general idea, the system is such that it recognizes these shortcomings, and addresses them (to an acceptable degree), an example of which might be that distinct threads are in some way merged with, or inherit from other threads (overriding certain aspects of them where it is optimal, etc), and improvements over time in one thread are automatically realized by other threads. Expanding this thought experiment to some obvious(?) end state design nearing "perfection", including similar ~cultural/behavioural design and enforcement aspects, as well as fundamental changes to things like the very structure of how we communicate with each other (and therefore contemplate) about ideas....if such a system was to physically exist within reality, is it possible that it may have a noteworthy effect on the future state of reality? (Another angle to think of it from is: did the development and widespread adoption of the scientific method and other advancements within humanity have an affect on the future state of reality?) Hopefully this gets the general idea across...despite being a fairly simple idea, it can be difficult to communicate it accurately (within the communication mediums we currently have access to). A very rudimentary example (but the best I've been able to find) of such a system is this: https://www.kialo.com https://www.kialo.com, but there are 5 to 10 different approaches I know of that are out there that come at the same general problem in unique ways. Kialo is currently far from perfect, but I think it brings a genuinely new form of thinking to the table in the way it structures and visualizes discussions...and think about how hilariously simplistic initial iterations of today's highly sophisticated products were when they were first introduced, and how back then very few of us could imagine with any sort of accuracy what would be achieved a few decades hence. Man's capabilities for imagination are hilariously flawed and inconsistent, and we seem to accept this shortcoming (and many others) as if it is immutable, without any concern for whether this belief (or, absence of belief) is actually true.
- tacon 5y agoI was doing research in a huge Texas oil company, amazed at some pronunciations. Schlumberger -> Slumber-jay, etc. There was a cute young female petroleum engineer (very rare back then), and I asked her to pronounce "c-e-m-e-n-t". She fired right back: "As a noun or a verb?" And that was my day as one in 10,000 to learn this rule... I wanted to ask her to have my baby.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoCement doesn't feel like it obeys this rule though.
- bonoboTP 5y agoStress is very hard for me as a native Hungarian speaker. In Hungarian stress can never fall in the middle or end of a word, if a word is stressed, it's always on the first syllable. Conversely, many English speakers learning Hungarian struggle with the vowel lengths (which can create differences in meaning) as this works very differently in the "stress-timed" English.
- wincy 5y agoI don’t know if this is related but my in-laws put a different stress on the store name “Best Buy” than I do. They say BEST buy, having more stress on Best. Whereas my family says “best BUY”. What’s really weird is that I even notice it at all, it’s really subtle and I’m not sure why it even bothers me.
- kashyapc 5y agoSpeaking of words ... here's a fun one: "founder" vs. "flounder". Both words can be nouns and verbs: • founder [noun] – one who establishes • founder [verb] – to sink / to collapse / to fail • flounder [noun] – flatfish • flounder [verb] – to struggle to move / to proceed clumsily Apparently[1], you cannot say "a ship flounders", but that "a ship founders", as jarring as it sounds. The Merriam-Webster has an excellent article on it here[1]. It begins this way: "The English language does not care if you are happy or sad. It is oblivious to your shrill entreaties for an orderly and sensible vocabulary. As proof of this supreme indifference we need look no further than the words 'founder' and 'flounder', for no language that cares about its speakers would ever allow this kind of semantic cruelty to exist." [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/can-a-ship-flounder https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/can-a-ship-flo... — "Can a Ship 'Flounder'?"
- Karunamon 5y agoThat reminds me of my favorite auto-antonym - a word where the noun and verb forms have completely opposite meanings. The lawmaker sanctioned(v) the sanction(n) Where the verb form is to permit, and the noun form is to restrict! English is weird.
- dhosek 5y agoIt's very common for writers, especially journalists, to use to sanction to mean to impose sanctions. I've given up on correcting them and in their defense, the OED has the verb to sanction meaning to impose punishment dating back to the early 19th century in legal contexts.
- rexreed 5y agoHere's another one that uses the same word in opposing contexts: After he left out the left door, there was no one left.
- dhosek 5y agoSo many people use flounder when they mean founder.
- JonathanFly 5y agoType 'How to speak English' into YouTube and you'll get absolute deluged with insanely complicated diagrams and flowcharts about stress-timing and vowel reduction -- so many rules that non-native speakers practice and explicitly learn but that you didn't even realize existed. Stress-timing alone must be really tricky coming from a language without it. Random example: How do you pronounce the word 'for' 80% of the time? Like the word 'her' with an f. fer. Random example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvba0DREM-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvba0DREM-s
- nojs 5y agoThis is a great example of why if you’re learning a language, once you pass the beginner stage you should be spending the majority of your time reading and listening, some time speaking and writing, and almost no time trying to learn grammar and other things. Even if you could somehow learn all the little rules like this, your brain won’t integrate them in a way you can use naturally. Unfortunately a lot of formal language courses and schools still focus on learning grammar, word usage etc in a top down way.
- grouphugs 5y agobad memories waterfall, good memories just don't, that's why bad memory debt is so hard to get out of, should just get out of the business of causing and propagating bad memories, it's getting late