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Polysyllabism in Sinitic, and (phonemic) syllable stress

Language Log 2025-01-31

AntC wrote:

To your recent point on the 'slippery, slithery' article …
 
There's a town on Taiwan's East coast 'Taimali' / 太麻里鄉. This name is from the indigenous Paiwan language [also here for the people]. [see wikip]
 
I naively pronounced it with stress on the first syllable. I was roundly corrected by the Taiwanese family I'm staying with for a Lunar New Year visit: that should be Tai(m)-'ali, with stress on second syllable.

I suspect they're modelling this on Tai-pei, Tai-chung, Tai-tung, etc. As you've repeatedly told us, the Tai- in Tai-wan is _not_ a Sinitic morpheme.
 
Wikip alleges Sinitic languages are syllable-timed; syllable stress is not morphemic — which would make sense _if_ Sinitic languages were monosyllabic. You beg to differ. So how does it go with stress within polysyllabic imported words?

Good observations and good question.

For a short answer, I would just say that, once a non-Sinitic word or morpheme gets swallowed up by the sinographic writing system, it also gets swallowed up by the phonology of the sinographic writing system.  However, in spoken sinitic languages, it is possible that, as I have often demonstrated and put it, "intonation overrides tone", whether for sinitic or non-sinitic morphemes and lexemes.  By "tone", we can also subsume other phonological and phonetic phenomena.  See the "Selected readings" below.

 

Selected readings