Word stress

A particularly striking feature is the African tendency towards more regular stress rhythms. Again, the problem lies often within the English tendencies to maintain partly the Romance principle of word stress on the penultimate syllable in contrast to the general Germanic principle of stressing the stem. This leads to differences in word stress between etymologically obviously related words when prefixes and suffixes are added, thus ad^Imire is not stressed on the same syllable as admi^Iration and ^Iadmirable; here East Africans are tempted to stress [ad'maɪrabl] and sometimes even [ad'maɪre'ʃen] just like [ad'maɪa]. Of course, the problem of a whole series of unstressed syllables is intrinsic to British Standard English; even American English has secondary stress regularly in words like secretary. Thus the final word stress on suffixes like -^Iize and particularly -^Iate may not be that surprising in theory, but it may be in practice. The tendency is not systematic, since in most cases the frequency and familiarity of words supports the “correct” British English pronunciation. In other cases better known, etymologically related or similar words may serve as models. This tendency faces the problem that Standard English uses stress to indicate word class. In EAfE the distinction between the verbs pro^Itest, alter^Inate, at^Itribute and the nouns ^Iprotest, ^Ialternate, ^Iattribute through stress is not always maintained.