Re: phonology of borrowed words
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, November 20, 2002, 14:40 |
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En réponse à John Cowan <jcowan@...>:
>
> Actually, we have now borrowed so many words with penultimate stress
> that it has become the default stress for newly encountered words: when
> my
> daughter (15) is reading out loud and runs into a word she does not
> know,
> it reliably gets penultimate stress unless the pressure of analogy is
> very strong: "unplinkable" would get stressed on the antepenult, e.g.
>
Strange. Seeing such a word, I would automatically stress it on -plink-,
because of the so many words in un--able which are stressed that way :) .
>
> The joke, or at least *a* joke, works in English too. This is just
> one of many idioms involving either "French" or "Dutch"; of the
> former,
> "French leave" (leaving without saying goodbye), "French letter"
> (obs., capote anglais), "French kiss" come to mind immediately, and
> there are certainly many more.
>
In Dutch, doing things "the French way" means never finishing what you've
begun, doing things sloppily, slowly and wrongly. Does it have the same meaning
in English?
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.
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