How to identify the stressed syllable of any English word
October 14, 2007 at 9:35 pm | In Language | 3 CommentsTags: ESL, Learning English, pronunciation, stress pattern, syllable, TEFL
It works by using your intuition. I found it here (via. J.A. from Cape Town):
As an aside, once, whilst drinking with a psycholinguist (say that after a few pints) I was taught a useful way of quickly working out the stressed syllable in any English word – something which is apparently called the ‘fuck test’.
Simply insert the word ‘fucking’ into the word, as if you were using the swear word for emphasis, and the syllable that follows the ‘fucking’ is the stressed syllable.
For example, absolutely -> abso-fucking-lutely. The stressed syllable is the third: i.e. absolutely. It works for every multi-syllable word I’ve found so far.
Which just goes to show that psycholinguists are some of the coolest melonfarmers in the whole of cognitive science.
I am no longer an English teacher, but my guess is that students would love this method to memorize stress patters:
fucking-photograph
pho-fucking-tographer
photo-fucking-graphic
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it even works with acronyms. Before reading your post, I wrote my own blog post for the day and used the following word: ISDfuckingN (ISDN) – coincidence eh
still, it proves the point. The stress, in ISDN, is of course on the ‘N’.
Comment by lenina — October 14, 2007 #
Hahaha… thats interesting.. but din work for me.. did it for u?
Comment by Nova — October 15, 2007 #
It did work for me, but I am sure wouldn’t help if I didn’t know a word already.
Comment by anaj — October 15, 2007 #