Stress
The word stress system of Sesotho (often called "penultimate lengthening" instead, though there are certain situations where it doesn't fall on the penultimate syllable) is quite simple. Each complete Sesotho word has exactly one main stressed syllable.
Except for the second form of the first demonstrative pronoun, certain formations involving certain enclitics, polysyllabic ideophones, most compounds, and a handful of other words, there is only one main stress falling on the penult.
The stressed syllable is slightly longer and has a falling tone. Unlike in English, stress does not affect vowel quality or height.
This type of stress system occurs in most of those Eastern and Southern Bantu languages which have lost contrastive vowel length.
The second form of the first demonstrative pronoun has the stress on the final syllable. Some proclitics can leave the stress of the original word in place, causing the resultant word to have the stress at the antepenultimate syllable (or even earlier, if the enclitics are compounded). Ideophones, which tend to not obey the phonetic laws which the rest of the language abides by, may also have irregular stress.
There is even at least one minimal pair: the adverb fela (only) has regular stress, while the conjunctive fela (but) (like many other conjunctives) has stress on the final syllable. This is certainly not enough evidence to justify making the claim that Sesotho is a stress accent language, though.
Because the stress falls on the penultimate syllable, Sesotho, like other Bantu languages (and unlike many closely allied Niger–Congo languages), tends to avoid monosyllabic words and often employs certain prefixes and suffixes to make the word disyllabic (such as the syllabic nasal in front of class 9 nouns with monosyllabic stems, etc.).
Read more about this topic: Sotho Phonology
Famous quotes containing the word stress:
“In the stress of modern life, how little room is left for that most comfortable vanity that whispers in our ears that failures are not faults! Now we are taught from infancy that we must rise or fall upon our own merits; that vigilance wins success, and incapacity means ruin.”
—Agnes Repplier (1858–1950)
“While ... we cannot and must not hide our concern for grave world dangers, and while, at the same time, we cannot build walls around ourselves and hide our heads in the sand, we must go forward with all our strength to stress and to strive for international peace. In this effort America must and will protect herself.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“A society which is clamoring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice. The stress is in our civilization.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)