What is the true pronunciation of "participle"? [closed]
I cannot seem to find anything on this. I see (in dictionaries, although not all of them) that the first syllable is stressed (I've been corrected countless number of times on this, too).
That means that many believe that saying it with stress on the second syllable is a way to broadcast that "you're an uneducated dummy who doesn't know how to pronounce it." But why? I don't understand.
The word "participate," for example, is on the second syllable, and it appears to me that the words are related etymologically (somehow...).
According to: https://www.etymonline.com/word/participle
participle in the grammatical sense (13c.), a variant of participe, and directly from Latin participium, literally "a sharing, partaking,"
This means that participe and participium are BOTH first-syllable pronunciations? That doesn't make sense.
Can someone explain? Or find some information that the second syllable is truly the wrong way to pronounce it?
Solution 1:
J. C. Wells, the phonetician, in his Pronunciation Dictionary (Longman, 3rd edition 2008) gives three possibilities for British English.
- ˈpɑ:t ɪs ɪp l, the most common pronunciation (spaces make the syllabification of the word clear)
- ˈpɑ:ts ɪp l, less common with only three syllables
- pɑ: ˈtɪs ɪp l, also less common than the first one with the stress on the second syllable
All three variants are considered acceptable.
When it comes to American English, only one possibility is given.
- ˈpɑ:rt̬ ə sɪp l
Presumably, in American English, stressing participle on the second syllable might be considered "wrong", while it wouldn't be the case in British English.
As to why, I'm not sure there is an answer. Pronunciation can change over time, different ways of pronouncing a word can exist at the same time, one can replace the other. Prague, for example, was recorded as only /preig/ by Michaelis and Jones in their Phonetic Dictionary of the English Language in 1913. There must have been a time when /prɑ:g/ started being used as well as /preig/. /preig/ has now completely died out for the Czech capital (I can't vouch for the way the various Pragues that exist in the U.S. are said though). Why is anybody's guess.
Solution 2:
Is "participle" pronounced with stress on the first syllable or the second syllable?
From Wiktionary:
participle
Pronunciation
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /pɑːˈtɪsɪpəl/
- (US) IPA: /ˈpɑɹtɪˌsɪpəl/
So some people stress the first syllable and some people stress the second syllable. According to Wiktionary, people in the US are more likely to stress the first syllable and people from the UK (Received Pronunciation) are more likely to stress the second syllable.
In each environment, the other pronunciation might be viewed as wrong.
The reason I like giving Wiktionary as a reference is that it refers to regional differences. The same entry from Oxford Learner's Dictionaries:
participle noun
- /pɑːˈtɪsɪpl/
- /ˈpɑːrtɪsɪpl/
Again both pronunciations are given, but no regional information.
English doesn't follow the pronunciation of other languages (e.g. Latin in your example). It only follows its own pronunciation, which almost inevitably varies by location.