accusative cursing

[James Harbeck]

>Interesting to me is the relationship between double consonants and stress.
>If a double consonant were to be used to indicate stress in a phonetic
>spelling system, should it come before or after the stressed vowel.  I take
>for example desert and dessert.  So I would believe the best place for a
>double consonant to indicate stress is before the stressed vowel.

"Desert" and "dessert" are something of an exception -- the
pronunciation of "dessert" is exceptional not just for the stress but
for the "length" before an orthographic double consonant and the
voicing of an orthographic double fricative. Normally in English a
double consonant after a syllable indicates a "short" vowel. (And let
us not forget the homophone verb "desert".)

In American spelling, when adding -ing or -ed, doubling of the
consonant indicates a stressed short vowel, and a single consonant is
either an unstressed short vowel or a stressed long one. There are
exceptions, of course, but consider "traveling" and "rappelling" and
"reconciling", or "exciting," "exiting," and "benefiting" (and
"befitting"). And this rule tends to guide other pronunciation, too:
the consonant(s) that matter(s) come(s) after the vowel. I'm hard
pressed to come up with a pattern of influence from the consonant(s)
before the vowel, except for inasmuch as a couble consonant before is
likely (but not certain) to indicate stress on the previous syllable
and therefore probably not stress on the vowel in question. Consider
"conning" versus "connive," "felling" versus "fellate" (but "filing"
and "dilate") -- it's the formerly open syllable (now, if ultimate,
ending in consonant plus "silent e") that gets the "long" vowel.
(Naturally, this being English, all rules have exceptions.)

To me, "nekkid" indicates clearly ['nEkId]; "nekid" would be ['nikId]
because of the orthographically open syllable, but it could also
stand for [n@'kId] or [nE'kId], though that would require some good
reason to be so, given the word's evident variation (in context) on
"naked" (which, mind you, ceteris paribus, would be pronounced
[neIkt]).

Funny thing how spelling can make so much difference in some of these
things. Pretty much everyone in Canada pronounces "stupid" as
['stupId] and not ['stjupId], but if you spell it "stoopid" that
indicates that the person is speaking in a low-grade, uneducated
manner. Likewise, many high-price Brits pronounce "ate" as [Et], but
if you spell it that way ("et"), it's emblematic of a country hick.
And so on. The implication being, evidently, that these people,
forced to exhaust themselves writing it down, would write it that
way... ditto with "nekkid," I suppose. Who transcribes New Zealanders
as saying "seeven" for 7? It would downgrade them. But they all do...
from a North American perspective. To them it's the natural way to
say it. And why shouldn't [n'EkId] be the normal way for speakers of
a given dialect to say "naked", if that's how their vowels have
shaped up?

James Harbeck.

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