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Why/how did British vs. American stress differences arise? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 month 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] 8 points 1 month ago

Large parts of the US didn't speak English till WW2.

Random communities spoke whatever the dominant immigrants spoke. German was the largest, but the reason everyone went to English had more to do with radio broadcast than anything. Before that local newspapers were just in whatever language.

Early radio needed clear enunciation, and since people were learning from the radio we exaggerated.

British went thru something similar. Modern British as we think of it is the "Queen's English" and was spoken by only the upper class till radio, which lead to the standard accent we now know.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Since Sherman shows this phenomenon happening already back in the 1600s, I don't think that either radio or non-English-speaking immigrants in USA played a meaningful role on this. It's simply internal variation.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

No downloading a random PDF ..

But I'm guessing it's referring to the standardization of spelling/grammar that happened when Dutch workers ran the first English printing press?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

The paper is called Noun-Verb Stress Alternation: An Example of the Lexical Diffusion of Sound Change in English, in case you want to look it up.

I’m guessing it’s referring to the standardization of spelling/grammar that happened when Dutch workers ran the first English printing press?

No. TL;DR the author picked data from a bunch of old dictionaries that showed stress info. Then he compared where they place the stress for a sample of 150 noun-verb pairs. Here's the result:

Diatone = paroxytone noun + oxytone verb. Note how the value changes over time, in a rather consistent way, already starting at least in the 1600s. It has nothing to do with the printing press, English doesn't even show stress in the standard orthography.

The author proposes this is a good example of lexical diffusion - the diatone stress pattern slowly spreads through analogy, from a handful of verbs to others. And since the process is slow, it's still happening, and different dialects may or may not have the diatone stress pattern spread to a specific verb. Sometimes you also see reversals, specially diatone→paroxytonic (English places the stress preferentially in the first syllable).

The only major external (non-English) interference I've seen in this would be loanwords from French, it seems to me they have a higher tendency to become or stay oxytonic.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Ah ok.

Kind of related, the vowel/stress change was happening when printing was solidifying Grammer and spelling rules.

Which is why things are spelled one way and pronounced another.

It was a language in flux where decisions were made by non native speakers who would just go on gut instinct.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

It's still happening. People often treat sound and grammar changes as if they were instant ramen, 3min and it's done, but they often take centuries.

Another example of the same process is the regularisation of strong verbs:

  • dare/durst → dare/dared (complete)
  • yield/yold → yield/yielded (complete)
  • burn/burnt → burn/burned (ongoing)
  • glide/glid[den] → glide/glided (ongoing)

And some are left unfinished, like the plurals - it started in Old English time but you still see pairs like child/children, sheep/sheep, goose/geese.

All of that is internal to the language. It doesn't really need external influences, like the printing press. All you need is children "filling the gaps": learning an word but not the associated irregular forms, filling them with rules they already learned, and eventually keeping that new form later on.

It was a language in flux where decisions were made by non native speakers who would just go on gut instinct.

All languages are in a perpetual flux. That said I don't think non-native speakers are a meaningful force in this.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I found a 1975 study from Sherman about this (backup link).

Those stress changes are really old and affect a lot of noun/verb pairs (more than just the -ate ones). Most variation was attested in the XVIII century, but at least one ("accent") already showed some variation back in 1634. (Check page 57 (PDF page 15) for a list.)

And in some cases you see three competing stress patterns for the same pair - both oxytone, both paroxytone, and diatone (paroxytone noun, oxytone verb); e.g. "bombard", "cement" and "outcast".

So, no, the presence of this variation in the UK is not due to USA influence. It was born there, and then spread to USA.

As for an explanation on why this happens: I don't know. But if I had to guess, it's a "conflict" between English "preferring" the stress in the first syllable, and "trying" to keep noun/verb pairs distinct.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

The paper is very interesting, but sadly it's not what I'm talking about. It talks about the alternation of the sort: objéct (verb) - óbject (noun), which is basically a manner of word formation, it is present synchronically and intradialectally. My examples are of semantically unmotivated shifts across different dialects and across time, happening among -ate verbs only (i.e. they don't form the verb-noun pair, it's just the same verb in both cases). So I see no "conflict" here to resolve.

It might be that the -ate shift is somehow analogically induced by the verb-noun shift - but how? It actually seems to go the opposite way: in the verb-noun pairs the verb has final stress, whereas the shift affecting the -ate verbs produces the noun-like initial stress. This certainly doesn't affect or support any existing distinctions, at most it just creates confusion by using the noun-like stress for verbs (assuming it is legitimate to call either of the accents noun-like or verb-like in general).

English “preferring” the stress in the first syllable

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. (Similarly so, it would be unacceptable/useless to say that English prefers /k/ to /g/ if all we could say about them is that the former is statistically more frequent than the latter.)

However, it seems you've nonetheless given me some material that might answer my question - the paper you link mentions the book Studies on the Accentuation of Polysyllabic Latin, Greek, and Romance Loanwords in English by B. Danielsson, which also addresses -ate verbs. I'll have to try to find it, it looks very promising.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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