Stress
Back in NL I was asked several times how to pronounce my name, where the stress falls? Until that very moment, I'd never thought about it. In Bahasa Indonesia, unlike in Dutch, stress is not very important.
It made me think twice when I'm teaching Bahasa Indonesia to my friends.
Basically, most of the time the stress is in the penultimate syllable. All non-Malay words have unpredictable stress, which mean a lot of words have unpredictable stress.
If you think about it, since it's not important, even if you are putting the stress wrongly, people still understand what you mean. Heck, most people wont pronounce it as you learn it anyway. That's one of the easy parts of Bahasa Indonesia.
2 comments:
If you are right ( and of course you are right - Ingmar said a minute ago he recognized the phenomenon :)), the language, at least the pronunciation, has not been codified yet. It can still go anywhere.
Well, isn't that perhaps because it is a young, dynamic language?
So you name is not a Malay one? And if I say TriesTI it is okay? Or should I try to leave any stress out ( which is next to impossible to my Dutch mouth).
@colson my name is the result of my mom creativity :) which as it happens sounds like Dutch/French word for sad.
I guess Bahasa Indonesia is just like old Italian before Dante codified it.
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