Many of the world’s languages make use of word-stress as a way of conveying grammatical and lexical information.
In English, words with contrasting stress can have related but significantly different meanings. For example, CONvict is a noun which refers to someone serving a sentence for having committed a crime, while conVICT is a verb which means to find someone guilty in a court of law for having broken the law.
Likewise, the English noun DESert refers to “a wasteland, wilderness, barren area”, such as the Sahara and Gobi deserts. In contrast, the verb desERT means “to leave, abandon”; with reference to military service or duty, it signifies leaving without permission.
This grammatical usage of word-stress presents some difficulty for people learning English as a foreign language because our English orthography gives no assistance at all to help readers tell where the emphasis should be placed.
The Modern Greek writing system, on the other hand, makes things easier for learners, including for young children, because all Greek words of two or more syllables indicate where the stress is to be placed in a word by means of an acute accent placed over the relevant vowel, for example πέρασα (pérasa) “I passed” and περάσαµε (perásame) “we passed”.
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Greeks may tell you that the Greek language is very easy to learn when it comes to stress because words are all stressed on one of the last three syllables. But the obvious problem for foreign learners is: how on earth are you supposed to know which one?
For English speakers, a not entirely facetious rule of thumb would be that Modern Greek words are most often stressed on the syllable where you least expect it! The Greek name which corresponds to the English form Elizabeth is Ελισάβετ (Elisávet), with the emphasis on the third syllable. The name of the ancient philosopher and polymath Aristotle is pronounced Aristotélis in Modern Greek.
Greek place-names can also often have stress patterns that are surprising to us. A small town on the south-east coast of Crete, whose name is most usually transliterated into the Latin alphabet as Paliochora, has the emphasis on the third syllable, Palióchora, whereas the natural instinct for most native English speakers would be to stress the penultimate syllable. The famous town of Marathon is pronounced Marathónas there.
Spanish word-stress obeys fairly simple rules if you know how to spell a word: stress is on the final syllable of a word if it ends in a consonant other than n or s, but on the penultimate syllable if it ends in a vowel, n, or s. Exceptions to this – and there are quite a few – are indicated in the spelling by the placement of an acute accent over the vowel of the stressed syllable. So the stress falls on the last syllable in Madrid, the second syllable in Sevilla, and the first syllable in Cádiz.
French is often considered to have no word-stress, with light emphasis generally being placed on the last syllable in an utterance. This means that words spoken in isolation sound as if they are being stressed on their final syllable.
Olympia
The Olympic Games had their origins in Ancient Greece, starting in the 720s BC and lasting there until the 4th century AD. The Games are named after where they were first held, in Olympia, a small town near the western coast of the Peloponnese peninsula of mainland Greece, about 10 miles inland from the Ionian Sea. In Modern Greek, the place-name is pronounced in a way which is surprising for us, namely Olimbía, with the stress on the third syllable.
