h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One major omission in this guide to pronunciation is that there is nothing about how you decide which syllable to accentuate. This is extremely important in Italian (my language). The rule you often see quoted "accentuate the penultimate syllable", only applies in a limited number of cases.
There are some useful rules, but it gets complicated. It's nowhere near as straightforward as Spanish which has easy rules and a written accent for exceptions.
pArlano NOT ParlAno
finIscono NOT finiscOno
automObile NOT automobIle
amichEvole NOT amichevOle
parAmetro NOT paramEtro
Ancora means anchor and ancOra means again, still etc
casIno means brothel and casinO (with a written accent on the final o is accented on the final o when pronounced.)

It'a a minefield.

Vasco

sorry, meant to say that the second pronunciation means casino in english - that is, a gambling casino.

It's because it is a minefield that I didn't bother trying to explain it. That and the fact that I don't understand it myself.

Fair enough. I just wanted to make readers aware of that aspect of pronunciation.

If you could summarise a general rule in a simple paragraph, I could add it to the article.

Something like this???:





As a general rule, the emphasis is placed on the penultimate syllable in a word. (SpaghEtti, ProvolOne, EmIlia RomAna). The most common exceptions to this rule are:

1. Verbs in the present tense, third person plural: pArlano, finIscono
2. Vowels with an ` accent over them are always emphasised. (Caffè, Città)
3. Some words with origins other than the Latin derive their pronunciation from the original pronunciation *
4. compound words, where a pronoun is attached to the end of the verb. The stress remains where it would have been if the suffixes had not been there (telEfonaglielo)**
5. In some words where the final syllable is an unstressed single vowel, this is practically discounted and the stress moves to the third last syllable.




*I suspect this is the reason for áncora above, but maybe we can find a couple more examples. ...ChimIco - the chemist

** this example (Telefonaglielo is used by Wiki - maybe we should use our own)



On browsing through a few Italian sites, I have found the following words which are not stressed on the penultimate syllable. I'm not sure of the etymology, so I can't put them into one of the groups above, but it might help organise the categories if we go into that.

fIsico - (adj: physical, to do with physics, s: a physicist) (Group 3 above?)
indIgene - indigenous (Group 3 above?)
erbArio - herbarium (Group 3 above?)
ornitolOgica - ornithological (Group 3 or 5 above?)
pAgina - page (Is this Greek? Group 3 above?)


By the way, the following pages on stress in Italian pronunciation either avoid the subject, or don't explain very well, and certainly don't give any guidelines:

http://www.askoxford.com/languages/it/toi_italian/pronunciation/?view=uk
http://www.unilang.org/wiki/index.php/Italian_stress
http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/phrases/italian/data/pronunciation.html

Surely we can do better than that!

The rules for stressing the present tense of verbs is more complicated then you might think.
The rule is that you must not only memorise the infinitive of the verb, but also the first person singular.
Then the rule is that wherever the stress falls on the first person singular it remains there for the second and third singular and the third person plural. The first and second persons plural take the stress on the penultimate syllable.
We are talking regular verbs here of course. SOME irregular verbs break these rules.
A good example is the verb quoted above by Trillian's child - telefonAre - 1st person singular telEfono
So the present tense is:
TelEfono
TelEfoni
TelEfona

TelefoniAmo
TelefonAte
TelEfonano

Another example is partecipAre - partEcipo
PartEcipo
PartEcipi
PartEcipa

PartecipiAmo
PartecipAte
PartEcipano

These same rules also apply to -ere and -ire verbs with the exception that -ire verbs which are formed in the 1st person with -isco always take the stress on this part of the verb:
capIre - capIsco

capIsco
capIsci
capIsce

capiAmo
capIte
capIscono

partIre -pArto

PArto
PArti
PArte

PartiAmo
PartIte
PArtono

Trillian's Child
I don't understand your 5th rule. Can you give an example?

I found several, but when I went to write them down, I couldn't find any. The only one I remember now was "CarAttere", as quoted in one of the links I gave. It seems that there are words which end in a vowel, where the final vowel doesn't count as a syllable.

But when I thought further, most examples have the emphasis on the second last syllable after all (SignorIna, enamorAta)

The word AutomObile could be construed as fitting this rule, however, but it seems the exceptions like this are in the minority. Funnily enough, another exception is the more usual word for car: MAcchina.

So maybe it's not a rule, maybe it's only applicable to a few exceptions.

For Gnomon's purposes, it is best to simplify it to 3, 4 or 5 basic rules, but to point out that there are exceptions to all the rules, and these are often quite common words, so must be learnt individually.

Rather than me trying to make sense of all this, can you summarise it into something I can add to the entry?

That was what I was trying to do. I would amend my suggestion, though, by deleting point 5, but adding a sentence such as:

The above rules are guide lines. There are many exceptions, which are often quite common words; these can best be learned by listening and copying"

What do you think, vascoprat?

No, you're right, Gnomon. I really ought to find some examples for my Rule 3. I'll run it past my husband this evening.

(I do have an Italian colleague, but she doesn't seem to understand the problem. I have checked Italian websites to see if they have any better explanation, but they don't seem to.)

It's hard to see the problems in your own language.

I've met plenty of German speakers who thought that German was completely phonetic, but in fact you have to know enough of the language to be able to identify syllable boundaries, since letters are pronounced differently depending on where in the syllable they are.

I'm enjoying the discussion. I'm about to go on holiday for a week. I'll make another contribution when I come back and see if we can all agree on something to go in the original piece.

I've discussed it with my husband and gone through his myriad Italian teaching books. They all skirt the question and the most specific go no further than giving the general "penultimate syllable" rule and the exception of the words with accentuated final vowels which are denoted by an accent over the last letter. (Città)

I put my theory to him about words of non-Latin origin occasionally having other syllables stressed, with the example of Ancora (anchor) and he said that it was derived from the Latin ...... then he added BUT that comes originally from the Greek. QED! (Although I realise this doesn't suffice to make a rule for our entry.)

We could just put the general rule in with a warning that there are exceptions.

We certainly could, and we would then be in line with all the other on line and printed books I've seen on the subject so far. But I was hoping we could do better!

In one of my choirs, I sit beside a professor of Italian. When I ask him how to pronounce Italian words, he mutters to himself for a bit, then tells me the answer.

Yes - that is a case of someone who knows too much. We want useable rules, not all the exceptions, but with a little detail so that people know where they might encounter an exception.

I will rephrase my wording in my post above and post it here in GuideML for you to drop in the entry. Sorry - lunch break's over, but next time I'm on line I'll do it. In the meantime, I'll formulate it in my head.