Re: "de ay ee resis"

CDB wrote:

Robert Bannister wrote:

CDB wrote:



Perhaps
one advantage over the acute accent for Pa Prunty was that the
diaeresis doesn't imply that the stress may be on the last
syllable.

Whilst I am aware that accents (usually the grave one) are often
used to indicate stress, I don't think a common spelling like
"café" implies anything about stress at all. The grave accent is
also used to show an unusually pronounced vowel in adjectives like
"learnèd, blessèd, agèd", though "Brontè" looks funny to me.


But "café" is stressed on the last syllable, as a lot of words ending in e-acute are, being borrowings from French and therefore conventionally stressed there.

1. I haven't heard the final stress pronunciation since about the 1940s, so I dispute this;
2. Why would borrowed French words be stressed on the last syllable? French itself does not have syllable stress.

I agree that the tendency is not
conclusive, and that's why I wrote "implies" and "may".

As for the grave accent, I agree that it looks funny there. I think "-èd" is conventional in English, but maybe not its other uses. As well, it has been suggested that the spelling of "Bronte" was modelled on Italian, and in that language a grave accent indicates that a final is stressed, as in "pietà". Perhaps another reason for choosing the "tréma"* was that it could appear in stout yet respectable English words like "coördinate".

*Quote quotes, not scare quotes.




--
Rob Bannister
.

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