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CHAT: barbarisms

From:dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
Date:Monday, May 14, 2001, 15:22
On Sun, 13 May 2001, John Cowan wrote:

> dirk elzinga scripsit: > > > Is this really Henninian pronuncation of Greek, or simply the > > principles governing English stress applied to names of Greek > > origin? > > If that were so, I'd expect /&akrow'powlIs/, not /@k'rAp@lIs/, > wouldn't you?
No, I don't think so. In words built on the Greek _polis_ (policy, politic, etc), the {o} is consistently given its checked pronunciation [A], indicating a short underlying vowel for this root. Stress in a large portion of the English lexicon falls on the penultimate mora, given final syllable extrametricality (i.e., final syllables don't count). This means that the underlying phonological representation of orthographic {-polis} is /'-pA<lIs>/. The final syllable is extrametrical, and doesn't count for stress assignment. /A/ is short, and hence monomoraic, therefore stress falls on the syllable immediately preceding. So we have Me'tro-polis, Minne'a-polis, India'na-polis, etc. Stress will never fall on the /A/. If the {o} were given its free value indicating a "long" vowel, then I would indeed expect stress to fall on it--as it does in Minne'sota, Ari'zona, etc, since in these cases the "long" {o} (= [ow]) is bimoraic. Given final syllable extrametricality, the stress would then fall on the first mora of "long" {o}. Dirk -- Dirk Elzinga dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu "The strong craving for a simple formula has been the undoing of linguists." - Edward Sapir