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Why/how did British vs. American stress differences arise? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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(I should note I'm ESL and I've noticed my pronunciation is a hodgepodge of British vs. American and older vs. younger pronunciation variants.)

As I was watching Geoff Lindsey's YT videos, I noticed the way he pronounces "transláte", particularly in "Google Transláte" where I heavily prefer the accent "tránslate" - although in the verb (i.e. outside the website name) I would be fine both with tránslate or transláte (but probably with mild preference for the former).

So I looked it up and it turns out this is a widespread case of variant British vs. American stress pattern, also affecting other "-ate" verbs: donate, locate, migrate... The polarisation doesn't appear to be absolute, e.g. to take representatives of US and UK pronunciation: Webster 1913 (=1890) has dónate, lócate, mígrate, but still transláte, Jones (Pronouncing Dict.) 1944 has final stress in all four, but the Concise Oxford Dict. of Current Eng. (1964) mentions the variant mígrate. Today the influence of US on UK is probably even stronger. But already in 1909 Jespersen mentions the variant pronunciation of dictate, narrate, and vacate (Mod. Eng. Gramm. vol. 1, §5.57), so surely it hasn't appeared in UK only due to US influence?

Is there some dialectological or formal explanation of this change, or a study of where and how it spread?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

semantically unmotivated shifts [...] synchronically

Sorry, then I misread your post - I focused on the diachronic morphophonological aspect. (I'm glad that the paper gives you a lead on what you want, though.)

I’ve seen this sort of claim regarding English stress many times, but it really isn’t an acceptable formulation, it’s a “rule” that can be applied everywhere and nowhere.

It's meaningful as a soft rule. It means that, unless there's some clear motivation against it:

new vocab gets stressed on the first syllable. e.g. if you show a speaker the word "wugwug", they'll pronounce it as paroxytone instead of oxytone.
old vocab is likely to shift the stress to the first syllable, instead of away from it. You see this for example in colour/color - it explains why the word is paroxytone, even if OF likely had it oxytone. (Or why English does no effort to transcode Japanese pitch accent into stress in words like "sushi" or "manga").

And it's useful in this case (from a diachronic PoV) because those pairs of words have been shifting back and forth between multiple stress patterns; without that rule you'd expect them to settle down as diatonic.