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Why YouTubers (and AI) get these English features wrong [weak forms and deaccenting] (www.youtube.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Skip to 11:18 for the actual linguistics content. The earlier part includes analogy to film/video editing styles. The ad read is also in that earlier section.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

One thing I would add is that this video made it seem as though English is relatively unique in being stress-timed. But there were comments under the video from speakers of a wide variety of languages, including Norwegian and German (which, combined with English, suggests perhaps this is an ancestral feature of the Germanic family?), as well as Ukranian and Russian. So it doesn't seem to be quite as rare as the video (perhaps unintentionally) implied.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

One thing I would add is that this video made it seem as though English is relatively unique in being stress-timed.

Indeed, it isn't - it's a really common feature across the world.

which, combined with English, suggests perhaps this is an ancestral feature of the Germanic family?

IMO it's possible, but unlikely. Two reasons:

PGerm had a 3-way vowel length contrast, so morae were likely a big deal in the language. Odds are that the language was either mora-timed (like Latin) or a middle ground between mora-timed and stress-timed.
Isochrony changes really fast, diachronically speaking. Portuguese is a good example of that - all dialectal variation is ~600yo, and yet the language shows dialects all across the syllable-timed vs. stress-timed continuum.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

Isochrony changes really fast, diachronically speaking

Makes sense. I suppose this very conversation is proof of that. Some people seem to be claiming some varieties of American English lack it, and certainly the video shows that the Influencer sociolect (if you can call it that) lacks it.