4 ms·

> Most important is that most Italian words have emphasis on the second-to-last syllable. Same thing in Spanish: The emphasis also tends to be on the second-to

> Most important is that most Italian words have emphasis on the second-to-last syllable. Same thing in Spanish: The emphasis also tends to be on the second-to-last syllable[0]. Unfortunately, many language teachers never tell you that. (In fact, I once had to tell a Spanish teacher and she was surprised the rule checked out.) [0]: More precisely, the rules are (I had to look them up as they have become so ingrained in me that I no longer remember them): > If a word ends with a vowel, or the letters ‘s’ or ‘n’, the penultimate syllable is stressed. > If a word ends with a consonant other than ‘s’ or ‘n’, the final syllable is stressed. Source: https://blog.lingoda.com/en/all-about-spanish-accent-marks-and-word-stress/ https://blog.lingoda.com/en/all-about-spanish-accent-marks-a...

naniwaduni 5y ago
These are the orthographic rules for where to when to write the tilde, viewed from the other side. This has only a tenuous connection to how the stresses are actually distributed—while placing stress before the last stem consonant is indeed the most common noun stress pattern, e.g. verb inflections are a lot more all over the place; if you pull up a typical conjugation table, some half of the entries need explicit accents because they don't follow these rules. The choice of which patterns to designate as default and which to write with accents is honestly kind of arbitrary. One can easily imagine an alternate universe where the standard orthography allocates accents by counting vowel letters instead of syllables, or with the slightly more synchronically opaque "last stem consonant" formulation, or one where coda n is formally regarded as a vowel—this doesn't require an AU, actually, just compare orthographies with the other Iberian Romance standards. (There's this one particularly notable pattern where final syllables with high vowel nuclei are almost always stressed in native vocav, which e.g. occurs reliably in 1st-person preterite conjugations. They're written with the tilde anyway, but it didn't have to be this way; no hispanophone sees "recibi" and entertains the possibility that it might have grave stress, that would sound unnatural even if they can't point out exactly what's wrong with it.)
- mejutoco 5y ago
  I am not sure I understand your comment. Surely, from the tildes and the ortographic rules one can figure out which syllable has the stress (non-ambiguously). In your example, recibí specifies where the stress is (last), even if it is the first time one sees this word. Same for recibo (second-to-last) or repopo (invented word). The tilde rules (vowel, ending in n or s, plus diptongos, hiatos and specified exceptions) are consistent. There is no breaking of rules in verb conjugations. Most are stressed second-to-last, but that is not the rule, just an observation. Or am I misunderstanding something?

naniwaduni 5y ago

These are the orthographic rules for where to when to write the tilde, viewed from the other side. This has only a tenuous connection to how the stresses are actually distributed—while placing stress before the last stem consonant is indeed the most common noun stress pattern, e.g. verb inflections are a lot more all over the place; if you pull up a typical conjugation table, some half of the entries need explicit accents because they don't follow these rules. The choice of which patterns to designate as default and which to write with accents is honestly kind of arbitrary. One can easily imagine an alternate universe where the standard orthography allocates accents by counting vowel letters instead of syllables, or with the slightly more synchronically opaque "last stem consonant" formulation, or one where coda n is formally regarded as a vowel—this doesn't require an AU, actually, just compare orthographies with the other Iberian Romance standards. (There's this one particularly notable pattern where final syllables with high vowel nuclei are almost always stressed in native vocav, which e.g. occurs reliably in 1st-person preterite conjugations. They're written with the tilde anyway, but it didn't have to be this way; no hispanophone sees "recibi" and entertains the possibility that it might have grave stress, that would sound unnatural even if they can't point out exactly what's wrong with it.)

mejutoco 5y ago
I am not sure I understand your comment. Surely, from the tildes and the ortographic rules one can figure out which syllable has the stress (non-ambiguously). In your example, recibí specifies where the stress is (last), even if it is the first time one sees this word. Same for recibo (second-to-last) or repopo (invented word). The tilde rules (vowel, ending in n or s, plus diptongos, hiatos and specified exceptions) are consistent. There is no breaking of rules in verb conjugations. Most are stressed second-to-last, but that is not the rule, just an observation. Or am I misunderstanding something?