pompey1969

@Quassnoi I now realise all I had to do was click on "mark all as read".

@Quassnoi No, I can't get rid of the red +1 for some reason. I am still being redirected to this chat.

@Quassnoi I have to reply to this to prevent the red +1 on the main Russian Stackexchange page next to my name. See my reply above.

I am English, but with Irish ancestry and a major hobby of mine is studying Irish. I meant hard and soft instead of broad and slender. Amazing that you understood it all the same!

@farfareast Forsyth's book does not claim to resolve every instance of stress in every word, but to note some broad principles, and it repays study. I'm not aware of good alternative academic treatment of this in the West.

@farfareast No "rule of thumb" is 100%, but there have to be some underlying patterns, as otherwise Russians themselves couldn't learn Russian. Stress in Russian isn't entirely random. No-one, whether a native or a foreign learner, could learn a language whose stress patterns were simply random.

@farfareast Биты, хиты are examples of words that are not part of some higher register of speech that have mobile stress, and Quassnoi has added a tendency towards shifting stress in планы and центра, which exhibit the exact same thing I referred to (nativised words of the colloquial register adapting). The other words mentioned all fit my theoretical approach. It is important to note that you do need to check the stress of each word you learn.

@farfareast I argued that the international-style words with mobile stress are seen as more colloquial, or that more colloquial uses of them could gain mobile stress. There is a tendency for loan-words to adapt over time to native phonology, particularly words that enter the colloquial everyday register of speech. You could give as an example фонетика with a broad /n/ - as it is a kind of specialised word, it hasn't adapted to the slender n.

@farfareast I'll make one comment here and then abandon the discussion, as this is not a discussion forum. No one has denied that Russian has mobile stress - so your comment on that is a non sequitur. However, I showed that it is accepted by Slavicist academics that loan words usually don't have mobile stress. The source I gave is from 1963. You could argue that academic discussion has moved on since 1963 - and you could give your sources for that, if you claim that.

@Quassnoi The system wouldn't let me edit that comment to include a tag to your username because 5 mins had passed. NB Forsyth was a university lecturer at the University of Glasgow.

I stated there were some foreign words that have adapted. You mention биты́ (possibly ending-stressed because it is a meaning found in a very colloquial context?). I have encountered few loan-words or international words with mobile stress, but one example is хиты́ (once again, a very colloquial word). A Practical Guide to Russian Stress by James Forsyth (1963) makes the point on p16 "most foreign loan-words and 'international words' have fixed stress". Examples given there are банк, билет, зал, класс, момент, парк, план, поэт, факт, центр. He mentions as exceptions words in -ор e.g. доктор.

It seems to me that foreign words are less likely to have mobile stress (there are some that do, but I can't think of them right now), particularly while they are still seen as foreign. Торт is a a borrowing from Italian. But as time goes on, the tendency is then for the word to feel native and to begin to adapt in terms of stress.

Привет! Это комната для общего разговора на русском языке? Что делать в этой комнате? Может быть, вообще немного людей бывают здесь но я могу присутствовать каждый день, если будет с кем разговаривать...