Stress-timing, Ros na Rún and the virgin ‘well done’ versus the Chad ‘good on you’
A pre-train dispatch
Ciao,
I’m just back from doing work events in Milan and Sestri Levante in Liguria. (‘Of course you are’ responded several Dublin people when I declined invitations with: ‘Sorry, am in Italy’.) I will be getting the train to Galway for Cúirt in a couple of hours but here are some thoughts in the meantime.
One thing I realised on the Italian trip was how vast a difference syllable-timing makes to the way one’s Italian is received. My Italian vowels tend to remain consistent, whether I’m speaking at the peak of my energies or from the doldrums of hungover befuddlement. Trilled Rs are touch and go but the tapped one rarely lets me down. Nor do the double consonants forsake me, except occasionally when I’m speaking quickly or distractedly. The most capricious wild card in my Italian is not individual sounds, but rhythm.
When I’m calm, confident and well-slept, I obey the even syllable timing of Italian. When I’m tired, my brain redirects to the more familiar track of heaving stressing some syllables and dropping others.
What that means in real money is you don’t wildly swing up and down between stressed and unstressed syllables in an Italian sentence. That’s why it’s so annoying to Italians when anglophones imitate them by doing the EET-sa ME, MAAAA-rio schtick. (Well, it’s one of the reasons it’s annoying.) Actually, we’re the ones who sound like Mario to them. We pro-NOUNCE HALF our SOUNDS in BLOCK CAP-itals — whereas an Italian speaking English, unless they’ve done a lot of accent work, will tend if anything to blend the syllables together more than native speakers do, only giving the stressed components slightly more emphasis. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this; it doesn’t impede understanding and it’s lovely to listen to, much smoother than the ups and downs of the Germanic meter.
That’s not to say Italians sound flat. But their famous musicality doesn’t come from syllabic variation; it comes from singsong intonation within a calmly undulating rhythm. Anglophones mentally translate that into varying the syllables when doing shitty Mario accents, because that’s how you stress things in English.
That said, Celtic-heritage anglophone accents exist. Irish, Scottish and Welsh speakers all have a reputation for sounding more musical than Anglo-Americans. It’s because the languages these accents come from are syllable-timed, not stress-timed. I can’t comment in detail on Gàidhlig or Welsh, but I can say that in Irish the importance of syllable-timing is so supreme that we simply add an extra syllable to a word — the emphatic form — when we want to underline it, rather than stretching out one of the existing syllables.
What makes my Italian rhythmic fluctuation an especially annoying problem to have is that I rarely drop the syllable-timing in Irish or French, two languages that came into my life pre-puberty. Spanish is a little more haphazard because I started learning it when I was sixteen. I am, as regular readers of this august Substack will know, fundamentally opposed to the idea that teenagers and adults cannot learn languages or can only master them to a certain level. But rhythm of speech is one of the hardest things to retain cognitive flexibility about after childhood; I think it’s actually easier to learn individual phonemes as an adult than to rejig your internal metronome — not because the cognitive tools aren’t still there but because it feels embarrassing to us, somehow.
The reality of course is that you sound far sillier in a foreign language when you don’t adopt its rhythms than when you do. I know this rationally. But when I’m stressed, tired or hurried, the minuet-style time signature of my English imposes itself on my Italian and Spanish, where one should really be waltzing. It’s a problem native speakers of any Germanic language tend to have, such that Italians and Spaniards often think it sounds German or Scandinavian when I do it because I mostly avoid other telltale anglophone sounds (diphthongised vowels, heavy rhotic R).
The result is palpable. Even a basic ‘Ciao, piacere’ goes down differently depending on the rhythm. I’m met with the unquestioned assumption that I am fluent in Italian when I say it in the syllable-timed way, and an inquisitive ‘Parli italiano?’ when stress-timing sneaks back in. It’s not a deal-breaker; I’m still being replied to in Italian, and the assumption is still that I speak it at least conversationally. But I’m not so immediately taken to be fully proficient when I say pia-CE-re as when I say piacere.
It’s absurd how little time we spend on these things in formal language education. If you nitpick a student for saying ‘una problema’, that fixes literally one word. But if you spend the same time explaining why it’s fluidly ‘unproblema’, not ‘UN pro-BLE-ma’, it gives them a blueprint for levelling up everything else they say. I think rhythm should be taught as a foundational aspect of pronunciation, not a bell and whistle to consider once you’re already fluent.
Caveat: syllable- and stress-timing is not black and white, but more of a spectrum. It is fair to say, however, that Italian and English are on widely different sides of the continuum.
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Besides these rhythmic adventures, I finished the first plank of a personal project in my hotel room in Italy: binge-watching the very first season of Irish-language soap opera Ros na Rún. The show started in 1996 and my aim is to complete it, which is not made any easier by the fact that it’s still going. But if I watch two episodes a day, I will presumably catch up eventually.
It’s worth watching if only (not only, but if only) for a window into how rapidly Ireland has changed over the past couple of decades. The prospect of an unmarried teacher living with her boyfriend is scandalous; divorce and contraception are taboo. That’s the reality of the society the screenwriters were depicting, but they were extremely progressive for the time in their approach. The gay couple encounter occasional homophobia but are largely portrayed as just people living their lives. Even after formal governmental censorship had abated in Ireland, Irish-language media enjoyed greater freedom. Against all stereotypes of it being a conservative language — I have no idea how a language can have political views but there you go — the screenwriters playfully and resourcefully used the perception of their endeavour as niche to get away with things that their English-language contemporaries didn’t dare.
One phrase the show got me thinking about is ‘maith thú’. To translate it to standard English, you’d have to say ‘well done’. But that’s not what it means. It means ‘good on you’, a phrase abundant in Irish English. The nuance is important to Irish people: ‘well done’ implies that I have the authority to judge you, that I am an arbiter of your performance. With ‘good on you’, I mightn’t know the slightest thing about your field, but I admire you anyway as a peer. Ireland does have a class system, but hierarchy is not as baked into our society as in the US or the UK. Our language reflects that.
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One last thing Ros na Rún got me thinking about: I was listening like a hawk every time someone said the number nine (‘naoi’) because it’s the first syllable of my name. Hardly anyone can say it 100% correctly in English. Within anglophone phonemes, ‘knee’ is closest, but the consonant here is simplified compared to the Irish. Properly it should be [ˈn̪ˠiː], with the N coming from further back in the tongue, almost a nwee sound with the edge taken off the ‘w’. I don’t say it that way myself in English because it doesn’t fit any of the other sounds I’m using. So ‘knee’ me by all means, but it’s nice to hear the [ˈn̪ˠiː] on occasion.
Like syllable-timing, this is an aspect of pronunciation chronically neglected in how we teach Irish. Gaeilge has two sets of consonants, broad (‘leathan’) and slender (‘caol’); in written Irish, the broad consonants are surrounded by broad vowels (a/o/u) and the slender ones by slender vowels (i/e). Anglo-Americans tend to perceive Irish names as unnecessarily vowelly, but they’re not there for show; they guide pronunciation. If my name were written ‘Níse’, the N would come much more from the front of my mouth, almost a softened Russian nyuh.
Unfortunately most English-medium schools teach ‘leathan le leathan agus caol le caol’ as purely a spelling difference rather than a phonetic one very audible to native speakers. The understanding most people leave with is: ‘If I have a slender vowel before a consonant then I must have one immediately afterwards too — for pedantry’s sake, seemingly’. Honestly, it was my time dabbling in Slavic languages far more than the Irish education system that made me able to hear the leathan/caol difference myself: Russian and Slovak don’t have our broad consonants, but some consonants are similar to our slender ones.
I wish more attention were paid to phonetic education in this country, not just in Irish but in all the languages we teach. As a country we’re mad into playing instruments and singing, but all that musicality gets tragically dropped when it comes to linguistic instruction. There’s nothing wrong with having a foreign accent, of course. But speaking another language with at least some of its flavour is a joy that everyone should be taught how to access. My accent is completely different in Irish to English because I learned the former mostly from Raidió na Gaeltachta; I enjoy how differently my mouth feels when I speak it. Why don’t we encourage children to take pleasure in really listening, in really trying to play a new tune?
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Anyway, I’d best catch my train. Happy Sunday.
Le meas,
N
This was so much fun to read! GRMA