dorisopran@a... asked:
dorisopran@a... asked:
> Caio, what is stress-timed and syllable-timed?
How am I supposed to know? I got that from a book!!!! :-)
>Does it have something to do
> with always stressing the penultimate syllable unless told to do otherwise
by
> means of an accent mark?
Before I remember exactly what the book said, let me cfy this one: Although
not many native speakers seem to know that, we use the accent mark when the
stress tells so, and not the opposite. Pronunciation comes first and
determines accent marks, and not the opposite. It's impossible to determine
the accent mark without knowing how to pronounce the word first ( what leads
to my
eternal question: what to use accent marks for in the first place? To prove
you know how to
pronounce that? Preposterous for native speaker, good for you!).
> I had no idea that was a difference between
> European and Brazilian Portuguese! What about the highly, highly
inflected
> to the point of sing-song of the Northern Brazilians? The Cariocas sing
> also.
That's why it's harder for us, Brazilians, to understand what the Portuguese
say than the opposite. A word like 'paletó' ( suit, in English ) would be
pronounced as suggested by the spelling by Brazilians ( in fact, most would
pronounce it as /palitó/, but all the vowels would be kept ) while the
Portuguese would say /plitó/. That is, they 'smash' the vowels in unstressed
syllables with the consonants and focus only on the stressed ones, just like
in English ( cotton--> /cotn/ or Glaucester --> /Glostr/, with a blended
schwa+R sound ). Northeasterners have kept more of the 1500's Portuguese
than Portugal itself, so they tend to 'sing' too. Carioca is in between,
since it is geographically in between ( of the Northern and Southern ends of
the country ) AND also due to the Portuguese court's flight from Europe to
Rio, than our capital, during Napoleon's invasion,
what brought Rio de Janeiro's peculiar S sound, /SH/, and R ( like the
French, since the court thought it was more sophisticate to speak French
instead of their national language. But they feared Napoleon!!! Don't ask me
to explain that! ).
Therefore ( Finally, I remembered ) : English is a stress-timed language,
since stress determines the
duration of a sentence's delivery ( what determines how fast you say a
sentence is the number of stressed sounds in them, not the number of
syllables. The unstressed syllables are in a politically incorrect way
'smashed' to fit in between ), while in most Romance language it's the
opposite ( that is, the number of syllables in a sentence determines its
duration, and unstressed syllables don't march on the street fighting for
equal opportunities ).
> But I'd venture to guess that normal speech for a Brazilian covers a
> way wider pitch range than any typical American's
I don't think so. Maybe volume, but not pitch, I guess.
Bye,
Caio Rossi
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