Is English a Tonal Language?
Channel: Xidnaf
Date: 2017-04-30

"Tone" doesn't make any sense when you think about it.



NOTE 1:  Sometimes people will talk about "secondary stress" or "secondary accent" or something like that.  This is a thing, but what I'm talking about here is "primary accent," which is the most stressed syllable in the word.  I know it might sound redundant to say that there's only ever one syllable with primary accent, but let me put it this way: there are never two syllables in a word that are tied for being most stressed.  This way of thinking about stress/accent is different from the way I learned about it at first, and I think what's going on is that the way linguists talk about it is different from the way it's treated in English poetry, which is what people are taught in English classes.



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Intro Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWXvSBHB210
Outro Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqiSIGJJehw