Where the Stress Falls

A five-minute film about stress and tone, the people who wrote the rules down, and the catalog.

5:29 · 720p · on YouTube · download the small version (14 MB) · this film: CC BY-SA 4.0, except the two UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive words (CC BY-NC 2.0), which keep their own terms

Every language puts the emphasis somewhere in a word, and many use the pitch of the voice to tell words apart. Linguists call these stress and tone, and they have been writing the rules down for two and a half thousand years, a few languages at a time. The film follows that history and shows how the descriptions of six thousand languages were read into one catalog, with the sentence and page behind every entry, and what you can ask of it once it exists.

Funding for AccStack was provided by Anthropic. AccStack is not an Anthropic project. AccStack is owned and maintained by Matthew Schwartz, Kevin Ryan, Matthew Gordon, Joe Pater and Larry Hyman.

Credits

Narration: a synthetic voice. Voices: Wikitongues contributors via Wikimedia Commons: Hausa: 'Abubakar speaking Hausa' (CC BY-SA 4.0); Cherokee: 'WIKITONGUES- Hassan speaking Cherokee' (CC BY-SA 4.0); Finnish: 'WIKITONGUES- Jenni speaking Finnish' (CC BY 3.0); Yoruba: 'WIKITONGUES- Olaniyan speaking Yoruba' (CC BY-SA 4.0); Thai: 'WIKITONGUES- Tao speaking Thai' (CC BY-SA 4.0); Quechua: 'WIKITONGUES- Casiano speaking Quechua' (CC BY-SA 4.0); Fijian: 'WIKITONGUES- Mila speaking Fijian' (CC BY 3.0); Hmong: 'May speaking Hmong Don' (CC BY-SA 4.0); Hindi, Polish, Mandarin and Swahili sentences: FLEURS speech corpus (Conneau et al. 2022), google/fleurs on Hugging Face, CC BY 4.0; "record" (noun and verb): Dvortygirl, Wikimedia Commons (En-us-record-noun.ogg, En-us-record-verb.ogg), public domain; Mandarin "ma" in four tones: Yue Tan, Collection audio libre de mots chinois (Shtooka project / Université de Caen, 2009), via Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive, CC BY-SA 3.0 US, creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us (妈 excerpted from 妈妈); Buriat and Najdi Arabic words: The UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive (Los Angeles: UCLA Department of Linguistics), archive.phonetics.ucla.edu, CC BY-NC 2.0; Buriat speaker Darima Sanzhina, recorded by Vadim Kasevich, Republic of Buryatia, 1991. Pages: Rigveda manuscript with Vedic accent marks (India, early 19th c.), The Schøyen Collection MS 2097 · image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain; Guangyun 廣韻 (rhyme dictionary, 1008), Southern Song printing · Seikadō Bunko Library, Tokyo, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain; Antonio del Rincón, Arte mexicana (Mexico: Pedro Balli, 1595), title page and f. 63r · scan: John Carter Brown Library / Internet Archive (artemexicana00rinc); Alexandre de Rhodes, Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum (Rome, 1651), title page and Brevis declaratio p. 8 · scan: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek via Wikimedia Commons, public domain; Lewis Grout, The Isizulu: a revised edition of a grammar of the Zulu language (1893), p. 35 · scan: The Library of Congress / Internet Archive (isizulureviseded00grou); George Pratt, A grammar and dictionary of the Samoan language, 3rd ed. (1893), grammar p. 2 · scan: University of California / Google Books / Internet Archive (agrammaranddict00pratgoog); Édouard Jacottet, Études sur les langues du Haut-Zambèze, I: Grammaires Soubiya et Louyi (1896), p. 83 · scan: University of Toronto / Internet Archive (tudessurleslan01jacouoft); J. W. Colenso, First steps in Zulu (elementary Zulu grammar, 1st ed., Ekukanyeni 1859), p. 3 · scan: The Library of Congress / Internet Archive (firststepsinzulu00cole); P. J. Hendle, Die Sprache der Wapogoro (1907), p. 5 · scan: University of Michigan / Google Books / Internet Archive (bub_gb_vYMBAAAAMAAJ); Antonio Maria Sala, 'Ensaio de grammatica kaiapó', Revista do Museu Paulista 12 (1920), p. 397 · scan: MBLWHOI Library / Biodiversity Heritage Library / Internet Archive (revistadomuseupa12muse); V. J. Courtois, Elementos de grammatica tetense (nova edição, Coimbra 1899), p. 9 · scan: University of Toronto / Internet Archive (elementosdegramm00couruoft); Henri A. Junod, Grammaire ronga (1896), p. 39 · scan: University of Toronto / Internet Archive (grammairerongasu00junouoft); 校改國音字典 Revised Dictionary of National Pronunciation (Ministry of Education, Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1921), 例言 p. 13 · scan: Wikimedia Commons; Lewis Grout, The Isizulu: a grammar of the Zulu language (1859), p. 44 · scan: Cornell University Library / Internet Archive (cu31924026951313); Ch. Fred. Hartt, 'Notes on the Lingoa Geral or Modern Tupi of the Amazonas', Trans. Am. Philol. Assoc. 3 (1872), p. 63 · scan: JSTOR Early Journal Content / Internet Archive (jstor-310258). Map: Land outline: Natural Earth (public domain); Language coordinates: Glottolog 5.2 (CC BY 4.0). Language lists: StressTyp2 (Goedemans, Heinz & van der Hulst 2014), language list only. Classification: Slavic family tree after Glottolog 5.3 (Hammarström, Forkel, Haspelmath & Bank), glottolog.org, CC BY 4.0; stress rules from the AccStack catalog. Screens: accstack.org (catalog, bibliography).