stress-timing and syllable-timing
I've heard that English is a heavily stress-timed language, so what would that make it sound like? Apparently, French is purely syllable-timed. What about Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese?
Can somebody actually explain the difference between stress-timing and syllable-timing? I understand it a bit, but I'm rather lost and reading articles doesn't help. Can they be represented in a written way? The differences that is.
And what about languages like Japanese? It is neither stress-timed nor syllable-timed. So what is it? And what are Chinese "tones"? Does Japanese have the same (or similar) thing?
Spanish and Italian don't really fit in either category. They both seem to be in the middle. If there is a Left and Right category, there has to be a middle category as well. That's the problem with categorizing ideas; how do we measure the idea of stress-timed and syllable-timed languages? That is why I see language as what they are, unique from one another.
In a syllable-timed language, every syllable has roughly the same length. In a stress-timed language, stressed syllables tend to be longer than unstressed ones.
Japanese could be called syllable-timed; it depends on what you call a syllable. Linguists generally prefer to call it mora-timed, where the "mora" is a basic unit of speech. For instance, a syllable with a long vowel takes up two morae, and the character ん (pronounced "n"), which always appears after a vowel, takes up a full mora by itself, so a word such as "hon" (book) is pronounced with two morae: ho-n. Each mora is the same length. So you could say that Japanese is syllable-timed and a word such as "hon" is two syllables long. But it's more accurate to say it's mora-timed, and a word such as "hon" is one syllable long, but two morae long.
- Kef
''What about Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese? ''
Continental Portuguese is stress-timed (just like Russian, English)...
Brazilian Portuguese is syllable-timed (just like French and Japanese)...
That's why some people say Continental Portuguese sounds ''Slavic''
and Brazilian Portuguese sounds ''French''.
Here is a comparison of Brazilian Portuguese and English rhythm patterns:
http://www.sk.com.br/sk-reduc.html