What's Initial Stress Derivation?

What's Initial Stress Derivation - another not so little thing that can make English so hard to learn!

Hosted by Dr. Erica Brozovsky, Otherwords is a PBS web series on Storied that digs deep into this quintessential human trait of language and finds the fascinating, thought-provoking, and funny stories behind the words and sounds we take for granted. Incorporating the fields of biology, history, cultural studies, literature, and more, linguistics has something for everyone and offers a unique perspective on what it means to be human.

Otherwords is a production of Spotzen for PBS Digital Studios.

[cannibalbananas]

It's crazy how native speakers just "understand" the rules, without knowing the rules. I didn't realize the nouns and verbs were stressed differently. I just do it intuitively.

[rami_ungar_writer]

I love it when she pushes up imaginary glasses and says "Actually" in that voice. Reminds me of Adam Conover.

[maddiejoy]

The more I watch videos like this, the more I realize what a privilege it is to speak English as your first language.

[luuketaylor]

ESL teacher here. Thank you so much for that tip at the end! I'm definitely going to show that in the future.

[gabesternberg]

Even as a native English speaker, that was actually incredibly helpful, thank you.

[skronkel]

Sharing this with my English students!!

[PalomaVita]

This is something I like to point out to the native English speakers in my French classes when they are faced with our pronunciation difficulties. Most of them have never consciously thought about this phenomenon!

[MOONHOZE]

The word "recall" can be a verb with either stress.
• to REcall = to call someone again/to request a product to be sent to its maker
• to reCALL = to remember something

[grf]

How I love listening to Dr. B! Always clear, informative, and fun.

[LovingHypnoASMR]

Loving this series! I love her presentation style ❤

[kkb_]

This actually made me think of a question: is there anything like this for 3 or more syllable words?

[ruthbennett]

What a lovely bit to share with English learners (both native & abroad!)
As a teacher, I am always happy to see « all y’all’s » posts. ❤

[CloudyDaze]

This is the best english teacher I've found on the internet

For this reason, in Spanish, we have to put an accent mark on the stressed vowel of the words, following some rules. There are some words we need to identify by context, but you can know their exact pronunciation just by looking the way their are written:

- Presente (noun, adjective, third singular person of the subjunctive present tense of the verb "presentar")
- Presenté (first singular person of the infinitive past tense of the verb presentar)

[MangaBottle]

This is actually useful information for conlanging! I could definitely incorporate it somehow...

[Maniacbob]

I love linguistics videos like these because they teach me things I knew but didn't know.

[onlyoneamong]

I'm not a native, but learned the difference from the get-go! Never had a problem with it because in Spanish we have a similar system in which one word may have 2 or 3 meanings, depending on stress! The awesome thing about Spanish though is that, stress is graphically marked with a tilde on top of the stressed vowel! For instance:
TOMO = I take.
TOMÓ = He, she, it took!
CANTO = I sing.
CANTÓ = He, she, it sang!
Thanks for sharing! 🍀🇳🇮🍀

[shadowman]

Its not an emphasis thing but i like to bug friends by occasionally reminding them that lead is said like read but lead is said like read

[genevaconventionsviolator]

The fact that English orthography has no way to distinguish between these words and no way to reliably distinguish its 10+ vowels is why it's so damn hard to learn

[HeiBao]

I never noticed the stress was different despite using it correctly. Glad im a native speaker and not trying to learn English at my age.