Mee and Noam Chomsky and Thomas Jefferson

I have decided--for the purpose of keeping the various matters of "this day's" blog, on the subjects of the accurate phonetic representation of Stress in the American English Language, and of its Grammatical or Semiotic Significance, together--simply to return to it and add to it, as whim, increasing mastery of diacritics, and expository purpose dictate and permit.

What the three of us dissimilar geniuses--Jefferson, Chomsky, and Mee--have in common, is that we have all three of us, at various times, determined to devise a phonetic transcription of the stress/unstress pattern (if pattern it be) of American English--and we have, all three of us, come severally to the conclusion that there are no fewer than five stress/unstresses which must be accounted for in a faithful sonic representation of our language. You gotta think that if three such utterly disparate virtuosi have arrived so independently at a basic fiveness, then five basic stress and unstresses in English must there be--not unlike, for mysterious never less, though sometimes more, than five of petals, digits, Personality Traits, and voice parts (or melodic lines) in perfectly balanced polyphony.

But, of course, I actually worked at my stress-phonetic of English longer than either of my illustrious colleagues--even kept a journal for decades in the script that I devised for it--and I, not unnaturally, discovered Peculiarities, and what the French call Idiotismes, of English in faithfully phonetic transcription which aren't (and which are, but which, for various reasons, are automatically overlooked) immediately evident in the quasi-hieroglyphic written English bequeathed us by historical accident.

The first of these Peculiarities in spoken and phonetic English is its perfectly clear and marked distinction, between Function Words (non-emphasized conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, articles, verbal auxiliaries), which receive what may be called normal unstress, and All Other Words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs), which receive what may be called normal stress (including, as we shall see later, normal emphatic stress and normal/demoted stress). It is, I think, not insignificant that this feature of standard spoken English--so ordinary and familiar that even most teachers of English forget to mention it--has no parallel in any other language in Earth, not even in Brazilian Portuguese, where the abbreviation of inessential grammatical elements in rapid speech is common.

A secondary, related, peculiarity of English is a level of what may be called normal emphatic stress, and its corollaries of normal stress, and of normal-but-demoted stress (used most commonly, as we shall see, to denote things which have already been mentioned).