stress-timing and syllable-timing

bkm   Sat Dec 22, 2007 6:52 pm GMT
I've heard that English is a heavily stress-timed language, so what would that make it sound like? Apparently, French is purely syllable-timed. What about Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese?

Can somebody actually explain the difference between stress-timing and syllable-timing? I understand it a bit, but I'm rather lost and reading articles doesn't help. Can they be represented in a written way? The differences that is.

And what about languages like Japanese? It is neither stress-timed nor syllable-timed. So what is it? And what are Chinese "tones"? Does Japanese have the same (or similar) thing?
Lorenzo   Sun Dec 23, 2007 1:16 am GMT
Spanish and Italian don't really fit in either category. They both seem to be in the middle. If there is a Left and Right category, there has to be a middle category as well. That's the problem with categorizing ideas; how do we measure the idea of stress-timed and syllable-timed languages? That is why I see language as what they are, unique from one another.
furrykef   Sun Dec 23, 2007 5:41 am GMT
In a syllable-timed language, every syllable has roughly the same length. In a stress-timed language, stressed syllables tend to be longer than unstressed ones.

Japanese could be called syllable-timed; it depends on what you call a syllable. Linguists generally prefer to call it mora-timed, where the "mora" is a basic unit of speech. For instance, a syllable with a long vowel takes up two morae, and the character ん (pronounced "n"), which always appears after a vowel, takes up a full mora by itself, so a word such as "hon" (book) is pronounced with two morae: ho-n. Each mora is the same length. So you could say that Japanese is syllable-timed and a word such as "hon" is two syllables long. But it's more accurate to say it's mora-timed, and a word such as "hon" is one syllable long, but two morae long.

- Kef
Guest   Sun Dec 23, 2007 7:36 am GMT
Y que?
Milton   Tue Dec 25, 2007 1:14 am GMT
''What about Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese? ''


Continental Portuguese is stress-timed (just like Russian, English)...
Brazilian Portuguese is syllable-timed (just like French and Japanese)...
That's why some people say Continental Portuguese sounds ''Slavic''
and Brazilian Portuguese sounds ''French''.

Here is a comparison of Brazilian Portuguese and English rhythm patterns:
http://www.sk.com.br/sk-reduc.html