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Comment by cjfd | Hacker News Reader

The most important rules seem to be missing here. Most important is that most Italian words have emphasis on the second-to-last syllable. Some Italian words have emphasis on the third-to-last syllable, e.g. 'il semAforo' (the traffic light) but that is the exception. Putting emphasis in the right place is the most important thing that makes Italian sound like Italian. If you do just this it already starts to sound like Italian. Another important thing in pronouncing Italian is that the words have to flow together. It is like you should ignore that there are spaces between words. I suppose that already would come more or less naturally to singers. The rules that the article mentions about c and g are also quite important.

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> Most important is that most Italian words have emphasis on the second-to-last syllable.

Same thing in Spanish: The emphasis also tends to be on the second-to-last syllable[0]. Unfortunately, many language teachers never tell you that. (In fact, I once had to tell a Spanish teacher and she was surprised the rule checked out.)

[0]: More precisely, the rules are (I had to look them up as they have become so ingrained in me that I no longer remember them):

> If a word ends with a vowel, or the letters ‘s’ or ‘n’, the penultimate syllable is stressed.

> If a word ends with a consonant other than ‘s’ or ‘n’, the final syllable is stressed.

Source: https://blog.lingoda.com/en/all-about-spanish-accent-marks-a...

These are the orthographic rules for where to when to write the tilde, viewed from the other side. This has only a tenuous connection to how the stresses are actually distributed—while placing stress before the last stem consonant is indeed the most common noun stress pattern, e.g. verb inflections are a lot more all over the place; if you pull up a typical conjugation table, some half of the entries need explicit accents because they don't follow these rules.

The choice of which patterns to designate as default and which to write with accents is honestly kind of arbitrary. One can easily imagine an alternate universe where the standard orthography allocates accents by counting vowel letters instead of syllables, or with the slightly more synchronically opaque "last stem consonant" formulation, or one where coda n is formally regarded as a vowel—this doesn't require an AU, actually, just compare orthographies with the other Iberian Romance standards.

(There's this one particularly notable pattern where final syllables with high vowel nuclei are almost always stressed in native vocav, which e.g. occurs reliably in 1st-person preterite conjugations. They're written with the tilde anyway, but it didn't have to be this way; no hispanophone sees "recibi" and entertains the possibility that it might have grave stress, that would sound unnatural even if they can't point out exactly what's wrong with it.)

I am not sure I understand your comment.

Surely, from the tildes and the ortographic rules one can figure out which syllable has the stress (non-ambiguously).

In your example, recibí specifies where the stress is (last), even if it is the first time one sees this word. Same for recibo (second-to-last) or repopo (invented word).

The tilde rules (vowel, ending in n or s, plus diptongos, hiatos and specified exceptions) are consistent. There is no breaking of rules in verb conjugations. Most are stressed second-to-last, but that is not the rule, just an observation.

Or am I misunderstanding something?

> Another important thing in pronouncing Italian is that the words have to flow together. It is like you should ignore that there are spaces between words.

I believe this is true for all languages. It’s certainly true for English — there is no pause between words in natural native speech.

When I listen to German the words seem more distinct from one another than Spanish or Italian. I wonder if it’s a reflection of how many words in the language end in consonants vs vowels.

Perception is a funny thing. It’s entirely possible that the words seem distinct to you for whatever reason, but that no difference would be apparent on an actual spectrogram.

I heard several times this comes from Latin, but I could be wrong.

I know at least two more languages where emphasis (stress) is standardized. In French and in Armenian it's always on the last syllable. With some exceptions of course, typically borrowed words, sometimes compound words.

The advantage of this is, it helps the brain separate and recognize the words faster. When we speak, the words are mostly glued together and from the point of view of speech recognition it can take some trial and error before the brain or your speech-to-text system can understand where each word ends. The standard-accented languages (I'm sure there's a term for that in linguistics?) make the job a bit easier. Anyway, just a fun fact.

> With some exceptions of course, typically borrowed words, sometimes compound words.

AFAIK there is no exception at all to this rule in French.

French stresses the last syllable of each sentence not of each word...

In addition to this if you are a native English speaker loosen the muscles of your mouth when you speak Italian.

Different languages require different movements of muscles and if you don’t adapt it just sounds like Italian with an English accent.

To quote an Italian: “…the English speak Italian with a closed mouth..”. I guess this is similar to the way Japanese people never seem to pronounce “L” correctly because the tongue movements are unfamiliar to them.

What’s funny is if you learn Italian well and travel around people will assume you are well educated from your lack of dialect like pronunciation/words.

Sung languages and spoken ones are different. From these comments it sounds like you don't sing much.

I recommend this 1996 book by McGee: Singing early music : the pronunciation of European languages in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance

https://www.worldcat.org/title/singing-early-music-the-pronu...

It's a primer for singers. In music, the emphasis and flow between words is given for you.

Aside: There are other biases built into Italian singing that will trip up singers in spoken Italian, too. For example, Italian opera is largely written in a metric form where the phrase emphasis is ALWAYS on the last word. That teaches singers an instinct for odd sentence structure, or for putting a weird accent where it doesn't need to exist in speech.

> Most important is that most Italian words have emphasis on the second-to-last syllable

Omg, that works like a charm hahaha. I just read some Italian (which I don’t speak) with this rule and I felt like I sounded Italian hahaha. Actually, using this rule to read English or french makes it sound Italian as well, great rule, thanks !! :)

The same is true in Spanish and I think Portuguese, so there you go ;)

Note: but don't forget that there are plenty of exceptions and words that differ only on the position of the stress.

Unless it's a verb that ends with -ano. In that case, stress the preceding consonant. It's kind of like the difference between urAnus and Uranus. There are other exceptions, but that's the most common and important one.

Absolutely not true or rather only true of some verbs. Urano is stressed on the a for example...

It's a general rule of thumb, so it wouldn't apply to proper nouns, but I did edit to specify verbs rather than all words in general. I do appreciate the irony that the example I chose breaks that guideline.

>most Italian words have emphasis on the second-to-last syllable

Good I like to drag out my 'Thats amoooooooooooooore' as much as possible :)

I wonder how many more years will it take before people stop using italo-american stereotypes when referring to italians, or at least update them to something earlier than the 50's

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