Re: phonology of borrowed words

At 3:40 PM +0100 11/20/02, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>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 :) .
Exactly: [.Vn.'plINk.@.bl=.] has antepenultimate stress; the final orthographic <le>
denotes a syllabic liquid.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson