USAGE: English stress (was: Qosmiani website)

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> I thought English speakers who did that explained it as: "this word looks
> foreign, or at least not English, and thus I must use a foreign accentuation",
No, I don't think so.  My daughter (age 14) was reading aloud the other day
from a Sherlock Holmes story (she likes to read aloud to me sometimes), and
I noticed that several words that she probably has never heard spoken got
penultimate stress, though I can't remember just which ones.  I doubt
she thought of those words as anything but unfamiliar English, certainly
not to be confused with the occasional bit of German or French or Latin
in the stories.

Or consider the chemical term "hyposulfurous", which has two accepted
pronunciations:  [haIpousVl"fjUR@s] and [haIpou"sVlf@R@s].
The latter clearly benefits from analogy with "sulfur" ["SVlf@R],
a native Germanic word (and so with initial stress),
but the former reflects the default penultimate stress.

--
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
Please leave your values        |       Check your assumptions.  In fact,
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     --sign in Paris hotel      |            --Miles Vorkosigan