false acronymy

[Dave Hause]

/'te.le.'phony/ would seem to be more a long distance fake.
Dave Hause, dwhause at jobe.net
Waynesville, MO
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Mandel" <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 10:54 AM
Subject: Re: false acronymy


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.]

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