Stress and rhythm

Say the same sentence in the six sisters and most of the words are shared — yet they sound like different worlds. Three things make the difference: the rhythm of syllables, where the stress falls, and how each language glues words together.

Syllable-timed rhythm

Spanish, Italian, French and Romanian are traditionally called syllable-timed: syllables come at a fairly even pace, and unstressed vowels keep their full color. English is stress-timed: it rushes through unstressed syllables and shrinks their vowels to a murmur (listen to the o's trade places in photograph and photography). The labels simplify — Italian noticeably lengthens its stressed vowels — but the practical lesson holds: give every vowel its full value. Spanish chocolate has four clear vowels [tʃokoˈlate]; English squeezes the word into two syllables.

Catalan and Portuguese sit in between: they reduce unstressed vowels. Central Catalan turns unstressed a and e into [ə] and o into [u] — casa [ˈkazə], xocolata [ʃukuˈlatə]. Brazilian Portuguese closes final unstressed -o and -e to [u] and [i] (gato [ˈgatu], leite [ˈlejtʃi]), and European Portuguese reduces so hard that whole vowels vanish. Romanian also has [ə], spelled ă, but there it is a full vowel in its own right, stressed or not: măr [mər] 'apple', casă [ˈkasə] 'house'.

Where the stress falls

Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Catalan have lexical stress: each word carries its own stressed syllable, and moving it can change the word. French has no word stress in that sense: the prominence falls on the last full syllable of each rhythmic group, whatever the word. In un café the weight lands on -fé; in un café noir it moves on to noir. That is why French never marks stress in its spelling — and why learners coming from the other sisters must stop leaning on individual words in French, while French speakers must learn each word's stress in the rest.

Gluing words together

All six dislike two vowels colliding across a word boundary, and each has its fix. Spanish uses sinalefa: the two vowels merge into one syllable in speech while the spelling stays the same — mi‿amigo, la‿otra, este‿año. Portuguese does the same in speech and fuses prepositions with articles in writing (de + o → do, em + a → na). Italian merges in speech and often writes it as elisione, with an apostrophe: l'amico, un'amica, dov'è, c'è, quest'anno. Catalan writes the apostrophe too (l'aigua, d'ara, m'agrada), and Romanian marks its fusions with a hyphen: într-o zi 'one day', s-a dus 'he/she went'. French makes élision compulsory for a set of little words — le, la, de, je, me, te, se, ne, que, and si before il — l'ami, j'aime, qu'elle, s'il; then it adds liaison and enchaînement, so a French phrase sounds like one long word.

Put it all together and the family resemblance hides in plain sight. Latin AUGUSTUM is agosto in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese — three syllables, though Brazilians close the last vowel [aˈgostu] — agost in Catalan, and août in French, often a single vowel [u]. Italian kept Latin's long consonants and final vowels; Spanish kept the vowels but softened the consonants between them; Portuguese nasalized and closed its unstressed vowels; Catalan shaved off final vowels and reduced the rest; Romanian, cut off from the West, grew central vowels of its own and took in a deep layer of Slavic words; French wore whole syllables away and colored what remained with nasality and rounded lips. Same words, six engines.