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Re: YAEPT French loans

From:J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...>
Date:Wednesday, August 13, 2008, 9:02
On Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:29:18 +0200, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

...
>I guess I just expect speakers of a language with 'free' >stress to be able to reproduce the stress-pattern of >a language with bound stress, but apparently English >English still defaults to word-initial stress just >like Old English did, despite a millennium of massive >Romance and Latin borrowings. A reassuring thought >in a way.
What's it like with Swedish then? In German, it's not the same everywhere. While in Germany French loans such as "Billet", "Budget", "Portemonnaie" etc. are usually stressed on the last syllable, in German-speaking Switzerland they are usually stressed on the first syllable. So some varieties still default to word-initial stress, while others don't. That doesn't prevent Swiss Germans from thinking they'd have a better French accent than in Germany because while in Germany the stress may be placed more correctly, it will be accented very exaggeratedly according to Germany accentuation patterns that make a very marked distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables. -- grüess mach

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Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>