There’s actually a word for this!
Tmesis Tmesis is a rhetorical device where a word is split into two parts with another word inserted between them, often for emphasis or comic effect.
We spent a solid week talking about fucking infixation in morphology class back in undergrad.
I can assure you that the rule on the slide is absofuckinglutly wrong. English speakers are remarkably consistent about how they do fucking infixation. Somehow, they all understand prosodic feet better than a room full of linguistics majors that just spent a week learning about it.
Phonology! My old friend!
Pho-fuckin-nology
Abso-no-fucking-lutely way
So the syllable needs to be edging before the fucking insertion.
Ehh… I like the spirit of this, but it’s not quite as immalleable as they say. You can have green great dragons if “great dragons” are a distinct thing from simply dragons. Like how in Game of Thrones, you’d say Ghost is a “white dire wolf”, not a “dire white wolf”.
that assumes you are speaking in iambic and I have issues with that assumption
As a philly boy i gotta say, iv never heard it prounounced that way.
Fun fact: Eddie Izzard once came to Berlin and did comedy gigs in German language. My favourite creaton of his: Ausgefuckingzeichnet!
Ricky would ace this course.
Phil - Fuckin - Adelphia.
And Adelphia’s dad just went to get his gun.
FYI: Inserting a word in another word like this is known as “tmesis”.
Do we need a rule for this? I mean, incred-fukin-ible just doesn’t work. That’s pretty obvious.
It’s a descriptive rule, not a prescriptive rule, and likely one snuck into the powerpoint to try and get the class thinking and laughing. Like calling the descriptions of gravity the “laws of gravity”, it describes something about the world we’ve seen, but there’s no Physics Police enforcing all matter follow the “Laws” - it’s just the term we use for a description of how things work.
A lot of advanced English classes are much more on the descriptivist side of things - observing patterns in ways we use language - than the prescriptivist approach we get in grade school where we’re just learning rote things like spellings.
It’s obvious to native speakers, but when you’re new to it and trying to learn the cadence to help make sense of spoken language, rules like these help
Fanta Fucking Stic.
Hmm…
Here’s Wiktionary’s category for 3-syllable English words in case anyone wants to get creative.
I’d argue putrescence is emphasized on the first syllable. But then I’m not a native speaker, so… But Putrescence sounds quite wrong to me.
When I started listening to lots of audiobooks and podcasts in English, I discovered that many words have the stress further than I’ve thought from reading them.
Yeah, it comes from “putrescent” which has a stressed second syllable. “Quintessence” is a close sibling structurally if that one’s less off-putting.
well - today I learned. I knew “putrescent”, I’d just been saying it with stress on the wrong syllable. Thanks!
To be fair, from the linked pronunciation example, putrescent doesn’t sound so wrong at all, while quintessence sounds really very very wrong :D We do have Quintessenz in German which is stressed on the first syllable, so that’s probably why. Coming from two latin words, combined into one, I’d argue both languages got it wrong, because the first two syllables should both have equal stress.
