hey everybody Jennifer from tarle speech with your pronunciation question today's
question is about word stress and compound nouns and our two words that
we're going to be focusing on today are holy day or a day of religious
observance and holiday which is often a day of festivities and we don't have to
work so let's look at these two words we have holy day and holiday oftentimes we
do have a holiday for a holy day in many countries and so this could get
confusing if you are using both of these in a sentence together so number one
let's talk about holy day and the rule that we're going to follow here is about
compound nouns and when we make a compound noun what we're going to do is
we are going to stress word number one make it louder longer and higher in
pitch and then we're going to link it to word number two meaning we're not going
to have a break in between there in between those two words and then the
second word is going to be softer and shorter and lower and pitch so we have
holy day holy day holy day holy day and think about saying hole e
day because we're definitely going to have that long EE here holy day holy day
and then second for holiday we have the schwa sound here so many people who are
speaking English as their second language will pronounce the I in the
middle of a word is a long e and that's not the case most of the time oftentimes
this I in the middle of longer words that are three syllables or more is
often the schwa sound the sound that very unstressed very short syllable so
for the word holiday think of saying the word halt like you walk down the hall
and then add that super-short and then add day so the
stressed syllable here is going to be hall hall a day hall a day hall a day so we're
going to stress the level number one the most the middle syllable is going to be
the least stressed and the shortest and then we're going to have our secondary
stress here on day holiday holiday holiday so let's look at both of those
again holy day holy day holy day holiday holiday holiday so the holy day in the
country is a holiday and the workers do not have to report so give it a try I
know people are going to notice the difference if you found this helpful we
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