deTAIL or DEtail?
Hi, I would like to know what's more common in American English:
deTAIL (last syllable stressed) or DEtail (1st syllable stressed).
According to Longman pronunciation dictionary, deTAIL is more frequent in US English (JC Wells gives it as the 1st option).
Are there any regional differences?
(and how about the word DEFECT? )
Thanks a lot
I think DE-tail is much more common. I do hear de-TAIL sometimes... there's at least one local newscaster that comes to mind who says it. Perhaps the dictionary intended to say that this pronunciation is more common in US English than in other dialects, rather than that in US English this pronunciation is more common than the other.
With "defect", it depends on whether it's a noun or a verb. The verb is always de-FECT. With the noun, it's apparently like "detail", where it could be said either way but I think DE-fect is much more common.
- Kef
I always say DE-tail ["di:t_heI5=]. The Longman and Cambridge online dictionaries both say simply that de-TAIL is the American pronunciation, but I suspect that DE-tail is more common in the US.
I myself agree myself that DE-tail (["dit_he:M_^] here) is most likely dominant in North American English, despite what the Longman and Cambridge online dictionaries may say.
>>For 'defect', I have the same stress alternation as in 'record': initial stress when it's a noun, eg. "There's a defect in this plate" and final stress when it's a verb, eg. "They're worried that the baseball team might defect after the tournament".<<
I suspect with verbs what is really going on is not that they have final stress or fixed second syllable stress underlyingly, but rather that they have root-initial stress (which is typical of verbs in Germanic languages) and such verbs have effectively been reanalyzed such that "re-", "de-", or like is actually treated as a prefix like "for-" or "be-" rather than really being treated as part of a root.
>><<I suspect with verbs what is really going on is not that they have final stress or fixed second syllable stress underlyingly, but rather that they have root-initial stress (which is typical of verbs in Germanic languages) and such verbs have effectively been reanalyzed such that "re-", "de-", or like is actually treated as a prefix like "for-" or "be-" rather than really being treated as part of a root. >>
That makes sense, especially when you consider that other noun-verb pairs have no stress alternation: a 'bottle, to 'bottle.<<
Exactly. The thing in particular is that this generally occurs in Romance and Latinate words which actually begin with prefixes ("re-", "de-", "con-", "dis-", "ad-", "ab-", "a-" from "ad-", "sub-", "super-", etc.) to begin with or which begin with what *sounds* like a prefix by analogy even if it is not necessarily etymologically such. Thus it seemed to me that the seeming retention of Romance and Latinate stress patterns in verbs but not nouns in such cases was not arbitrary at all, but rather was due to the adaptation of Romance and Latinate stress patterns to Germanic ones in a manner that took Romance and Latinate morphology into account (or due to analogy having similar effects).
I guess deTAIL is the newscasters' pronunciation ;)
I've heard it many times on CNN.