# Pronunciation of Noun + זה/זו



## hadronic

Hello,
I've seen a lot but never _heard_ that construct : נושא זה, משפחה זו.
How do you pronounce it ? In one word without pause with final syllable bearing stress, or with a short pause and both words stressed ? I don't know if I'm being clear, I will try to exemplify what I mean :
בנושא זה : benosezé (one straight string with final stress) or benoséezé (lengthened stress-bearing "se" followed by stress-bearing "ze").
Thank you !


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## arielipi

Depends on what you emphasize; but mostly its with no pause and stress in sentence is on the ze/zu/zo.


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## anipo

Normally there is a tiny pause between both words. The Hebrew speaker senses it. Whether a non-speaker does, I wouldn't know.


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## arielipi

anipo said:


> Normally there is a tiny pause between both words. The Hebrew speaker senses it. Whether a non-speaker does, I wouldn't know.



The pause is like any other pause between two regular words, so it doesnt count; thats my opinion anyway.


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## airelibre

arielipi said:


> The pause is like any other pause between two regular words, so it doesnt count; thats my opinion anyway.



Agreed, the stress is benosé zé.


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## hadronic

airelibre said:


> Agreed, the stress is benosé zé.



So you keep each word's stress ?
In contrast, with personal suffixes, only the suffixe has the stress and the main word loses it.
In phonology,two consecutive stressed syllables are avoided , and either one of them loses the stress, or a very short pause is inserted.(famous example in Hebrew is hu amár lánu)


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## arielipi

hadronic said:


> So you keep each word's stress ?
> In contrast, with personal suffixes, only the suffixe has the stress and the main word loses it.
> In phonology,two consecutive stressed syllables are avoided , and either one of them loses the stress, or a very short pause is inserted.(famous example in Hebrew is hu amár lánu)


As i previously said - when talking about how to say things in hebrew remember that hebrew is open to all forms of sentence structure as long as words and connected words are by the rules; that is a sentence is composed of (groups of) words that as long as these words are by the rules - the sentence is ok.

What is *mostly* being stressed is the ze/zu/zo.


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## airelibre

hadronic said:


> So you keep each word's stress ?
> In contrast, with personal suffixes, only the suffixe has the stress and the main word loses it.
> In phonology,two consecutive stressed syllables are avoided , and either one of them loses the stress, or a very short pause is inserted.(famous example in Hebrew is hu amár lánu)



They are separate words so they each keep their stress. Monosyllabic words don't exactly have a stress as such, but it's not as if בנושא and זה become one word when next to each other. 

What do you mean by your example? I don't hear a significant pause between אמר and לנו, only the standard pause you hear between any two words.


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## hadronic

@arielipi: the problem is that you said both of my options  : "Stress is on ze/zu/zo" and "the stress is benosé zé". 
Agreeing on both is contradictory to me.


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## airelibre

There is some stress on benosé but there is then a greater stress on zé, don't worry about it too much, in time you'll hear people and pick up the accent, if you expose yourself to spoken Hebrew. For the meantime, if you say the phrase, however you say it you should be understood.


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## hadronic

In other terms, is "bemorekha" (in your teacher) pronounced any different from "be nose ze".
Meaning, is "ze" a phonological clitic ?
In French, you can have "maisón" (house, final stress) and "(cette) maison-cí" (house-this, final stress, no stress at all on "maison"), so that "ci" behaves like clitic.

Regarding "amár lánu" : you can't possibly pronounced two stressed syllables one after the other. English , French, Hebrew, all are languages that avoid it in a way or another (stress shifting, pause insertion,...). My question is : how is the stress clash in "ze" constructions in Hebrew resolved.


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## origumi

arielipi said:


> Depends on what you emphasize; but mostly its with no pause and stress in sentence is on the ze/zu/zo.


ze/zo, not zu.


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## airelibre

hadronic said:


> In other terms, is "bemorekha" (in your teacher) pronounced any different from "be nose ze".
> Meaning, is "ze" a phonological clitic ?
> In French, you can have "maisón" (house, final stress) and "(cette) maison-cí" (house-this, final stress, no stress at all on "maison"), so that "ci" behaves like clitic.
> 
> Regarding "amár lánu" : you can't possibly pronounced two stressed syllables one after the other. English , French, Hebrew, all are languages that avoid it in a way or another (stress shifting, pause insertion,...). My question is : how is the stress clash in "ze" constructions in Hebrew resolved.




I don't see how it is impossible to have two consecutive stressed syllables, provided they are from different words.

eg. "The teacher *begíns clásses* with the register". 

There is no unnatural pause here, or shift of the stress.


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## origumi

airelibre said:


> I don't see how it is impossible to have two consecutive stressed syllables, provided they are from different words.


I agree. Once it's perceived as different words, there's no stress issue.

Take for example the sentence הן יש לי כאן סוס קט זה. Several single-syllable thus stressed words, no "tricks" to dissolve the stresses. One can put extra stress on some of the words, yet by default they are equal.

Modern Hebrew pronunciation treats זה as a separate word, not attachment to the noun.


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## hadronic

origumi said:


> Take for example the sentence הן יש לי כאן סוס קט זה. Several single-syllable thus stressed words




Single syllable word doesn't equal stressed word, and far from it.
In your example, in normal speech and outside specially drawn attention on any segment of it, some syllable will receive the stress, and some other will not, and 99% of the speakers will chose the same ones. And there lies the starting point of linguistics studies and theory on stress and prosody.


In English, there is an abundant literature on stress clash avoidance, see for instance www_dot _linguistics_dot _ucla dot edu/people/hayes/Papers/HayesPhonologyOfRhythmInEnglish1984_dot pdf.
In the above example of airelibre, I'm no native speaker of English, but there might be some primary and secondary stress involved, but mostly importantly, I believe that there will be a pause insertion / lengthening of the first stressed syllable. When I try to say the following two sentences:
- the téacher begíns || clásses...
- the téacher begíns a cláss...
I "feel" like I could insert a "a" in the gap between begins and classes on the same metered strong beats.


Back to Hebrew, I did find some books and article dealing with this topic, though not always very exhaustive. Lewis Glinert's "The Grammar of Modern Hebrew" and Coffin's "Reference Grammar" both cite the same example, namely "hu amár lánu" becoming "hu amár lanú".
I found this very interesting article www_dot umass_dot edu/judaic/faculty/documents/Bolozky1982.RemarksonrhythmicstressinMHJornalofLinguistics18_dot pdf, and it talks briefly about stress shift on page 280, and gives similar examples : hem báu akhréy khamésh, but hem báu ákhrey shéva, or atá mevín otí, but áta mvín otí, when schwa is deleted.


So the multiple choices to solve the stress clash of my original question can be:
- pause / lengthening : be nosé || zé, or be nosé-e zé
- last wins (clitic): be nose zé,
- first wins : be nosé ze,
- stress shift : be nóse zé.


But I guess I will never be really sure until I find someone to pronounce it in vivo 
Thank you.


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## hadronic

Just wanted to cite here the introductory stance of the Hebrew stress paper, that states the quasi-universality of stress alternation and stress clash avoidance (highlights are mine):

« The tendency for sequences of *stressed syllables to rhythmically alternate with unstressed ones* seems to be common enough among the languages of the world - see, for instance, [...]etc. Many other languages do not exhibit typical alternating stress patterns, but still show preference in that direction, primarily *in breaking or avoiding sequences of two consecutive stressed vowels that are not separated by a perceivable constituent break.* This is the so-called 'rhythm rule', which has been discussed quite extensively for English (e.g. in Liberman & Prince (1977), Schane (I 979a, b), Kiparsky ( 1979), Selkirk (1978), Bresnan (1972), Gimson (1962), etc.) and for other languages (see, for instance, a recent description in Nespor & Vogel (1979) for Italian). »


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## arielipi

hadronic said:


> Just wanted to cite here the introductory stance of the Hebrew stress paper, that states the quasi-universality of stress alternation and stress clash avoidance (highlights are mine):
> 
> « The tendency for sequences of *stressed syllables to rhythmically alternate with unstressed ones* seems to be common enough among the languages of the world - see, for instance, [...]etc. Many other languages do not exhibit typical alternating stress patterns, but still show preference in that direction, primarily *in breaking or avoiding sequences of two consecutive stressed vowels that are not separated by a perceivable constituent break.* This is the so-called 'rhythm rule', which has been discussed quite extensively for English (e.g. in Liberman & Prince (1977), Schane (I 979a, b), Kiparsky ( 1979), Selkirk (1978), Bresnan (1972), Gimson (1962), etc.) and for other languages (see, for instance, a recent description in Nespor & Vogel (1979) for Italian). »



Leave the books alone! what do they matter in practice? nada, zilch.
we already answered you, and books are for higher talking about things, of the ideal way of things, just like we were told RTTI doesnt happen in industry on first year in CS, and the year later we were told "hahahaha of course it happens - all the time" by a former industry worker.



airelibre said:


> They are separate words so they each keep their stress. Monosyllabic words don't exactly have a stress as such, but it's not as if בנושא and זה become one word when next to each other.
> 
> What do you mean by your example? I don't hear a significant pause between אמר and לנו, only the standard pause you hear between any two words.


i never said both of those; check the comments.


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## origumi

hadronic said:


> « The tendency for sequences of *stressed syllables to rhythmically alternate with unstressed ones* seems to be common enough among the languages of the world - see, for instance, [...]etc. Many other languages do not exhibit typical alternating stress patterns, but still show preference in that direction, primarily *in breaking or avoiding sequences of two consecutive stressed vowels that are not separated by a perceivable constituent break.* This is the so-called 'rhythm rule', which has been discussed quite extensively for English (e.g. in Liberman & Prince (1977), Schane (I 979a, b), Kiparsky ( 1979), Selkirk (1978), Bresnan (1972), Gimson (1962), etc.) and for other languages (see, for instance, a recent description in Nespor & Vogel (1979) for Italian). »


As written several times in this thread: the noun and following זו are separate, unlike in French I guess. Therefore there's no issue of two stressed syllables in the same word. This is clear an simple.


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## airelibre

hadronic said:


> Just wanted to cite here the introductory stance of the Hebrew stress paper, that states the quasi-universality of stress alternation and stress clash avoidance (highlights are mine):
> 
> « The tendency for sequences of *stressed syllables to rhythmically alternate with unstressed ones* seems to be common enough among the languages of the world - see, for instance, [...]etc. Many other languages do not exhibit typical alternating stress patterns, but still show preference in that direction, primarily *in breaking or avoiding sequences of two consecutive stressed vowels that are not separated by a perceivable constituent break.* This is the so-called 'rhythm rule', which has been discussed quite extensively for English (e.g. in Liberman & Prince (1977), Schane (I 979a, b), Kiparsky ( 1979), Selkirk (1978), Bresnan (1972), Gimson (1962), etc.) and for other languages (see, for instance, a recent description in Nespor & Vogel (1979) for Italian). »



The language in this paper is very cautious (many, in that direction, tendency, common enough) which just shows how this phenomenon is not followed all the time, and in fact I'd say that at least for languages like English and Hebrew, it's not very common at all. Maybe I'm wrong and it's something so ingrained in me that I don't realise I'm doing it.
Nevertheless, certainly for the mentioned examples (begins classes, amar lanu etc.) I don't hear any "tricks" used to shift stress and so on so it's not something that without it language just breaks down and doesn't work, as you seem to believe.


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## hadronic

We obviously have different views on the topic...    I understand that the issue is "minor" and do also understand that it's not something that will break the language at all.   Thing is, I do feel within myself that stress clash issue (@Origumi: across word boundaries, not only in the same word). I didn't wait to find books and articles to feel disturbed by that issue. Books just proved me I wasn't the only one to feel so  For me, it's pure "common sense", but of course you will always find counter-examples. For instance, everybody feels that a language will "tend" to avoid strings of six consonants, by either schwa/vowel insertion or syllabification of some sonorants (l,r,m,n..), yet Polish is famous for not bothering too much with all that.   Regarding stress clash, English, from all languages, is notoriously known for that. @ airelibre: yes, the entire process / mechanism is so totally ingrained in you that you just don't realize it.   Let's put it on stand-by.The day I find a native speaker of Hebrew, I'll tell you what I heard... Thanks again.


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## origumi

I don't understand what you're talking about. There's no problem in Modern Hebrew to say סכין זה just like סכין חד. We say one word at a time.


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