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LostInParadise's avatar

Is this a quirk of the English language?

Consider the word fourteenth. If I asked you which syllable gets the stress, you would without hesitation say it is the second syllable, and if you look it up in a dictionary, that is what you will find. That works just fine if you say, “I will be there on the fourteenth”, or “Fourteenth Amendment”. But what if you say “fourteenth person” or “fourteenth page”? Doesn’t the stress now shift to the first syllable? It is so much easier to stress the first syllable when the following word also stresses the first syllable. The same holds for the other numbers in the teens. Offhand, I can’t think of any other adjectives or adverbs that work that way. Let me know if you can think of any others.

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