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Author Topic: Is your language stress-timed or syllabe- timed?  (Read 458 times)

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Is your language stress-timed or syllabe- timed?
« on: June 26, 2018, 08:29:07 pm »
Found on italki and interesting discussion about the question of isochrony in languages.
"English is a stressed time language, not a syllable-timed language" how appropriate is the title of this discussion?
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KingSlayer

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Re: Is your language stress-timed or syllabe- timed?
« Reply #1 on: June 26, 2018, 09:05:53 pm »
Persian is a stress-timed language.
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Re: Is your language stress-timed or syllabe- timed?
« Reply #2 on: June 26, 2018, 10:20:14 pm »
I was never thinking about it... and it's hard to judge for me. I tried to find an answer in the internet, but this topic almost doesn't exist in Polish internet. I found only one website, where they say that 'there is tendency to keep equal time between stressed syllables'. But I hear that the rhythm of speech is different in different parts (people from my region speak less melodic way than than people from the East parts). Interesting thing is that Polish is usually accented at the second syllable from the end of the word (with little exceptions). And I didn't noticed different length of syllables in our everyday speech.

And I found this:
Quote
Within the space of canonical rhythm types, Polish has been placed between stress- (Rubach and Booij 1985) and syllable-timing (Hayes and Puppel 1985) and consequently, is often described as “mixed” (Nespor 1990).
in https://repozytorium.amu.edu.pl/bitstream/10593/8541/1/Malisz_doktorat.pdf
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Re: Is your language stress-timed or syllabe- timed?
« Reply #3 on: June 28, 2018, 10:43:15 pm »
Apparently, German is stress-related.

Except that I found this:
http://apcz.umk.pl/czasopisma//index.php/LinCop/article/viewFile/LinCop.2014.044/6329

While some of it went right over my head, several paragraphs made a lot of sense to me:
"It  also  should  be  noted  that  there  is  a  possibility  that  languages  do  not fall  into  distinct  classes  but,  rather,  are  placed  along  a  continuum  ranging from  stress-timed  to  syllable-timed  languages  (Dauer  1987).  This  assumption is confirmed by the existence of languages such as Polish, which cannot be placed into one of the established rhythmic categories because it displays characteristics of both stress- and syllable-timing (Ramus et al. 1999). To reconcile the rhythm class hypothesis with the possibility of rhythmic continuum, Ramus et al. (2003) suggest that there are more categories, with Polish belonging to a distinct rhythmic class."
And this:
"Furthermore, if phonetic correlates of  rhythm  are  to  be  found  in  the  measurements  of  consonantal  and  vocalic interval durations, then the prediction is that structurally similar languages, and, especially dialects of the same language, should not differ with respect to rhythmic organization. Yet, it is not unusual for historically closely related languages to have distinct rhythmic structures. For instance, two Turkic languages, Uzbek and Turkish, belong to stress-timed and syllable-timed classes, respectively (Sjoberg 1963, Lewis 1967). Similarly, in Italian and Portuguese, a pair of two Romance languages with comparable syllable structure,
the former is described as syllable-timed, whereas the latter is described as stress-timed  (Major 1981,  Farnetani  and  Kori  1990).  Furthermore,  distinct rhythmic types can be found in different dialects of one language. Standard Russian, for example, is a typical stress-timed language, whereas most of its
northern dialects have rhythmic characteristics of syllable-timing (Kasatkin 2005: 25). Notably, the most salient feature differentiating northern Russian dialects  from  standard  Russian  is  the  absence  of  vowel  reduction  (Avanesov and Orlova 1965)."

In other words, nice theory, but no cigar. ;)
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KingSlayer

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Re: Is your language stress-timed or syllabe- timed?
« Reply #4 on: June 28, 2018, 11:13:16 pm »
It turns out that Persian is not a stress-timed language or at least there is no reputable source to verify that it is. In fact, I have found some articles with conflicting information about whether Persian is a stress-timed language or it's a syllable-timed language. It's so sad that nobody in Iran pays enough attention to theoretical linguistics. Such a shame!
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