false acronymy

[Mark Mandel]

Ri-i-ight. /ae.'kra.nI.mi/ then?

The reason I ask is more general than this lexical item. I seem to
relatively often hear abstract nouns such as e.g., "telephony" stressed on
the first syllable like their concrete counterparts, with secondary stress
on the penult (and in that case also the corresponding unreduced vowel).
It's a conflict between faithfulness to, on the one hand, etymology and the
general structure of such nouns, and on the other hand transparency with
respect to the familiar concrete noun.

-- Mark A. Mandel
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]


m

On Dec 13, 2007 5:29 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:

> On Dec 13, 2007, at 1:54 PM, youl wrote:
>
> > BTW, Arnold, how do you pronounce "acronymy"?
>
> to rhyme with "synonymy".
>
> a
>

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