Hello everyone it's Jennifer with Tarle speech with your question of the week. Our question today
is about adding suffixes to words and we have two words to talk about this. Our words are fertile
and equal. So when we are talking about prefixes and suffixes, we always have to think about the
root word or the main word. So our main word here is fertile and equal. So to pronounce these words
we are going to stress syllable one in both of these root words. So we have fer dull and e kwul.
So fertile and equal. Now
most of the time when we add a prefix or a suffix to a word the root word, stress does not change,
and we see this when we add this ize suffix and we have fer duh liz and e kwuh liz.
So we're still going to have the stress on syllable
one. There is a difference that you might be seeing and hearing in these words
and that is that we're going to use this short uh sound in the middle of the word,
that schwa sound. And the reason is, is that as words get longer, the beats get
shorter , and so we're oftentimes going to have that short quick schwa sound in a longer word.
So we have fertilize and equalize. So we have fertile and fertilize; equal equalize. So you can
hear I'm stressing syllable one and making that louder, longer, and higher in both of these cases.
Now we have some suffixes, some additions to the end of words, that we call stress
exception suffixes. They impose a new stress rule and we see that when we add the i t
y suffix. I have some other videos on this. I like to teach it as ity is pronounced uh dee uh dee
So again we have that schwa here, that uh sound. And then we have that long d with that long e
vowel at the end. uh deeuh dee. When you see i t y we are going to pronounce it as uh dee.
Now what happens to the stress? You can see I have it underlined. It's a little tell for you.
We're going to shift the stress to right before the uh dee
ending. So it's going to be fer till adi and equality. So fertility and equality.
So let's listen to all of these and I want you to listen from top to bottom. It remains
the same for the first two and then shifts for the last two. So we have
fertile fertilize fertility equal equalize equality
So again we have
fertile fertilize fertility equal equalize equality
So again most of the time when we add a suffix to a word, the root word or the main word
stays the same in terms of word and syllable stress.
But we are going to shift that stress in some cases and we see that with this i t y suffix
which we pronounce as uh dee and we are going to stress the syllable right before that ending.
So one more time all the way through.
fertile fertilize fertility equal equalized equality
So give it a try I know people are going to notice the difference. If you found
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Thank you everyone!