Etcetera

[Robin Riley]

(Robin)
Her book isn't freely available, on line, alas ... but I do like this new word,
"phonotactics"  ... the tactics of sound!

Would, then, “beautiful” (always stressed on the first syllable), and “equality”
(always stressed on the second syllable) be  examples of iambic words
(with patterns of stress, or a beat, strong, weak, strong; weak strong, weak)?

Perhaps that's why the Spanish, of our orchard workers,
sounds so fast, they tend to strongly accent every other syllable... ?

Am I being too hard on Jae ...  
what with all my pattern of stress?

Iambic and bad!
I am Woman!  
Well, it's a good song, anyway!

Robin

*******
(Herb)
I suspect it's simply a phonotactic adjustment of the sort that speakers not
driven by etymology make.  English has very few iambic words with /ts/ after
the first vowel.  I can't think of any immediately, and Valeda Blockcolsky's
40,000 Selected Words: Organized by Letter, Sound, Syllable doesn't give any
either.  Plenty of trochees but no iambs.  So we change the /t/ to a /k/
because we have plenty of /Vks-/ or /Vgz-/ iambs.  This strikes me as
similar to the pronunciation /'nukj at l@r/ for /nu'klj at r/, since there are so
few /-klj at r] forms but plenty with /-kj at l@r/.  We reorganize the
phonotactics to our expectations.

-----Original Message-----

Is the commonly-heard pronunciation of "etcetera" as "exetera" or "ek
setera" a regional or dialectal thing (like "axe" for "ask") or simply a
misapprehension of the letter order?  Could it be related to the Italian
eccetera? A. Murie