Our sense that a vowel is stressed combines loudness, length and pitch. The last usually means deeper, giving gravitas, but can be higher, giving challenge. A syllable is composed of onset, nucleus and coda. Most of the energy in a syllable is in the force of the air stream of the vowel, which is the nucleus. The sonagram below shows highest amplitude over vowels but in bands; the fricative covers many frequencies. Some syllables e.g. “be” do not have a coda. The coda in any case carries least energy.
Germanic words usually stress the first syllable and follow it with an unstressed syllable. In OE and OD this motivated alliterative verse for mnemonic use by bards. This is called a trochee following the poetry convention of Ancient Greek, though strictly that meant long-short. Stressed followed by two unstressed syllables is called a dactyl, though three syllables in a single word were unusual in OE. If you hear two equally stressed monosyllabic Germanic nouns, you may interpret them as two words:
“A crow is a black bird, but a crow is not a blackbird”
French has syllable-timed prosody; English has a stress-timed prosody. This helps the English-speaking learner a lot, though may oversimplify. Another useful oversimplification, which competes with the above, is: “Germanic is left-headed; French is right-headed”.
English borrowed thousands of words from French, giving 29% of our vocabulary by some estimates. Our borrowing imposed a Germanic stress pattern on the original.
Among the earliest loanwords were Norman food words, which were different from the OE animal names:
boeuf → “beef”, mouton → “mŭtŭn”, poulet “pŭlǐt”, both trochees
venaison → “venəsən” or “venısən”, a dactyl
These were doubtless acquired by bonnes in service. “Faites votre curteisie a ma dame” gave the loanwords “curtsey” and “madam”, with the expected re-stressing.
There are numerous mis-hearings in our loanwords, including “beefeater, “chef” and “pup” – an interesting back-formation from “poupée”. Any more?
Borrowings for nouns and adjectives usually impose Germanic stress on the first syllable
Most 2-syllable nouns: PRESent, EXport, CHIna, TAble
Most 2-syllable adjectives: PRESent, SLENder, CLEVer, HAPpy
But borrowings of verbs from French can import right-headed stress
Some 2-syllable verbs preSENT, exPORT, deCIDE, beGIN
Emphatic stress alters usual prosodic stress, so a military command may stress the final syllable. A considerable number of the right-headed verbs are military. Examples are:
“All soldiers PRESent and correct, preSENT arms!”
“IMports are exceeding EXports; the country must exPORT or die!”
The syllable count of a French origin word may be one longer than the English loanword, because of a final schwa. This may follow from an (unspoken) syllabic rule, which rejects a coda finishing with a consonant. In the following example there is an extra syllable in “Européenne”
F: err – rrho – pay – en – nuh ko – myew – no – tay
E: yewr – up – ee- un kom – yew – nut -ee
French Phonology
The next example imposes the rule “French has syllable-timed prosody”. The effort to use equal stress may then avoid a typical substitution error by English speakers, inserting a /j/ sound in “Européenne”.
F: exportez vos produits manufacturés via le service export de la Communauté Européenne
E: export your manufactured products via the European Community’s export office
French inserts a final /ə/. The IPA transcription for the English illustrates Germanic re-stressing of three noun loanwords. The fourth noun is a loanword from Flemish and means “swan”. How should she say “Brussels”?
F: je suis étudiante en littérature française à l’université de Bruxelles
E: aɪ æm ə ˈstjuːdənt ɒv frɛnhebrʧ ˈlɪtərɪʧər æt ðə ˌjuːnɪˈvɜːsɪti ɒv ˈbrʌsəlz
Some borrowings from French were of bound morphemes. Shakespeare is credited with up to 1700 neologisms. One class of his creations applies a bound morpheme as a suffix. Germanic suffixes such as ness are unstressed, but we did various things with French suffixes. I have a spreadsheet of Shakespeare’s neologisms, including suffix classes, if anyone wants to play with it.
-able became two little unstressed syllables “ŭbŭl”, e.g. “likable”
–été has too much stress so we made société into “sos- ai-ŭt-ee”
Shakespeare’s neologisms sometimes used morphemes. Other French suffixes were: <-ment>, <-tion>, <-ure>, <-ish>, <-al>
Confronted with French sentences as high language, English speakers accommodated sometimes and assimilated sometimes, as Piaget might say. But what happened down at the phoneme level? The 44 of MnE are very close to those of OE, except for the loss of /x/ and the s/z split, but did we acquire any French sound units? Perhaps the /ʒ/ sneaked in. We accommodated to “pleasure” and “vision” but assimilated “marriage” into /marɪʤ/. We may still be trying to force assimilation. Do you keep a car in a /garɑːʒ/ or a /garɪʤ/? Do posh ladies wear /biːʒu:/ and lower class girls /ʤuːᵊlz/? Would the political philosophy of Reform UK be /farɑːʒɪzᵊm/ or /farɪʤɪzᵊm/?