Monday, March 10, 2008

<em>Emphasis</em>

eekbeat and I had the pleasure of joining will and BR tonight for dinner in Richmond. The official report: huzzah! We had a blast, and the sneaky BR-will conspiracy squad even managed to pay the tab on a purported mission to the bathroom. (Thanks again!)

Among the weighty and important subjects that crossed our conversational plates was, of course, unfogged.

I noticed that will seems to pronounce it UN-fogged, but I have always said un-FOGged (kind of dropping off at the end*). Of course, I'd never be one to norm anyone's pronunciation, but I'm curious what other people say, since it's not really a common word outside the keyb0ard-addicted many who utter its syllables.

Masses: what say you?

*eekbeat, teo, et. al.: don't cut me if this linguistic phenomenon has a name that I don't know of; rather, share!

6 Comments:

Blogger Will said...

I suspect that the correct way is to say unf-OGGED. As everyone certainly knows, in Farsi the stress is on the final syllable for nouns.

But, I prefer to view it as a place to achieve clarity. Thus, UN-fogged.

BR and I had a great time, but still didnt solve that one riddle that befuddles us: Why is the fabulous eekbeat with Stanley?!?!?!?!?

We kid. We kid.

10/3/08 9:15 AM  
Blogger The Modesto Kid said...

The 'o' is not pronounced: "unf'ged".

10/3/08 9:43 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I put the accent on the second syllable, which is the usual way a word like that is accented in English. The third syllable seems to trail off because there isn't a third syllable; it's a two-syllable word ending in a consonant cluster and the "e" is purely orthographic.

11/3/08 2:32 AM  
Blogger Stanley said...

Ooh, thanks for the technical explanation, teo. I didn't mean to imply that there's a third syllable, but rather that in the second syllable the F and the G seem to get more emphasis than the D. I don't know if there's a name for this or if it's just like a "well, yeah, duh" sort of thing.

11/3/08 1:36 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think that's probably just because the second consonant in a syllable-ending cluster comes at the very end of the syllable and less energy gets put into it than into the other consonants.

11/3/08 3:02 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

So, basically, a "yeah, duh" thing.

11/3/08 3:03 PM  

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