I when I said invariable accent I did not mean an invariable rule for
accent. It is true that those rules are especially irregular. What I
meant was that you can look up a word in an English dictionary and it
will tell you the accent and it does not change with its position in
a phrase or sentence.
Winsor
Long Beach, California, USA
On Jul 16, 2006, at 11:11 AM, Manuel Viet wrote:
>> Even from what you say an invariable accent on a
>> certain syllable does not seem to be part of the word as it is in
>> English, German, or Spanish.
>
> That is untrue. To the contrary (and it's scarce in french), there
> are no
> singularity in that rule, while english is highly irregular
> depending on
> where the considered word comes from. To me, it's like having to learn
> english twice : once I had to get the basics of the vocabulary, and
> then,
> after some years of practice and travels, when I really began to be
> "fluent",
> I had to go through the dictionary a second time to know where the
> accent
> was. I can't pretend to be bilingual, but funnily, when I meet
> native english
> speakers now, they've got a much harder time guessing where I'm
> from. I've
> heard everything from Australia to Scotland along with Canada and
> Wales, but
> when I say 'french' that comes as a big surprise because unlike
> others I do
> take care to accentuate.
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