words with the stress on a different syllable than it looks like it should be on

Protestant

Catholicism

omnipotent

I’m starting to suspect that Christianity in specific really hates people like me who don’t now how to say words correctly

Comments

  • some of this has something to do with how English speakers apparently have some subconscious desire to stick accents on the third-to-last syllable rather than the second-to-last

    i know i've disputed the pronunciation of some words on this basis, with me favoring the second-to-last stress over the third-to-last stress, but i forget what they are off the top of my head
  • edited 2021-05-06 16:16:12

    some of this has something to do with how English speakers apparently have some subconscious desire to stick accents on the third-to-last syllable rather than the second-to-last

    I guess this is kind of what is going on with "Catholic" vs "Catholicism" but I think this kind of change of emphasis when you add a suffix doesn't feel weird in cases like "heretic" to "heretical" or "Italy" to "Italian". (Apparently my subconscious wants to continue the theme.) The reason it would feel weird for "Catholicism" specifically is that it's inconsistent with the common pronunciation of "Catholic" where the second syllable disappears entirely.

    As for "Protestant", that one is just weird because it doesn't match either pronunciation of "protest".
  • edited 2021-05-06 17:50:52
    oh i remembered one example then i looked it up and turns out *I* was wrong lol

    "oregano"

    I saw this, and I pronounced it "oreGAno"

    my dad insisted that it was "oREgano"

    i was like, this is obviously derived from something like Italian, which is like Spanish, and so I'm applying Spanish pronunciation rules to it because it just makes sense and it sounds right like that, whereas your pronunciation sounds like bad American English mangling or somesuch

    i just now went and looked up the etymology
    "from Spanish 'orégano'"

    whelp
    literally from Spanish, where it is literally accent-marked on the e
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