Esperanto Phonology - Stress and Prosody

Stress and Prosody

Within a word, stress is on the penultimate syllable, with each vowel defining a syllabic nucleus: familio "family". An exception is when the final -o of a noun is elided, usually for poetic reasons, as this does not affect the placement of the stress: famili’ .

On the rare occasions that stress needed to be specified, as in explanatory material or with proper names, Zamenhof used an acute accent. The most common such proper name is Zamenhof's own: Zámenhof. If the stress falls on the last syllable, it is common for an apostrophe to be used, as in poetic elision: Oĝalan’.

There is no set rule for which other syllables might receive stress in a polysyllabic word, or which monosyllabic words are stressed in a clause. Morphology, semantic load, and rhythm all play a role. By default, Esperanto is trochaic; stress tends to hit alternate syllables: Ésperánto. However, derivation tends to leave such "secondary" stress unchanged, at least for many speakers: Ésperantísto or Espérantísto (or for some just Esperantísto) Similarly, compound words generally retain their original stress. They never stress an epenthetic vowel: thus vórto-provízo, not *vortó-provízo.

Within a clause, rhythm also plays a role. However, referential words (lexical words and pronouns) attract stress, while "connecting" words such as prepositions tend not to: dónu al mí or dónu al mi "give to me", not *dónu ál mi. In Ĉu vi vídas la húndon kiu kúras preter la dómo? "Do you see the dog that's running past the house?", the function words do not take stress, not even two-syllable kiu "which" or preter "beyond". The verb esti "to be" behaves similarly, as can be seen by the occasional elision of the e in poetry or rapid speech: Mi ne ’stas ĉi tie! "I'm not here!" Phonological words do not necessarily match orthographic words. Pronouns, prepositions, the article, and other monosyllabic function words are generally pronounced as a unit with the following word: mihávas "I have", laknábo "the boy", delvórto "of the word", ĉetáblo "at table". Exceptions include kaj 'and', which may be pronounced more distinctly when it has a larger scope than the following word or phrase.

Within poetry, of course, the meter determines stress: Hó, mia kór’, ne bátu máltrankvíle "Oh my heart, do not beat uneasily."

Emphasis and contrast may override normal stress. Pronouns frequently take stress because of this. In a simple question like Ĉu vi vídis? "Did you see?", the pronoun hardly needs to be said and is unstressed; compare Né, dónu al mí and "No, give me". Within a word, a prefix that wasn't heard correctly may be stressed upon repetition: Né, ne tíen! Iru máldekstren, mi diris! "No, not over there! Go left, I said!" Since stress doesn't distinguish words in Esperanto, shifting it to an unexpected syllable calls attention to that syllable, but doesn't cause confusion as it might in English.

As in many languages, initialisms behave unusually. When grammatical, they may be unstressed: k.t.p. "et cetera"; when used as proper names, they tend to be idiosyncratic: UEA, or, but rarely *. This seems to be a way of indicating that the term is not a normal word. However, full acronyms tend to have regular stress: Tejo .

Lexical tone is not phonemic. Nor is clausal intonation, as question particles and changes in word order serve many of the functions that intonation performs in English.