“Frequent” and Other Heteronyms

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Elisa calling from Long Island, New York.

Elisa from Long Island.

Hi, Elisa. Welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Yeah, sure, no problem. What’s going on?

Well, I have a question about the pronunciation of a word.

The word frequent and frequently, I pronounce those that way.

But when I’m thinking about the verb, I always pronounced it frequent.

And my cousin made fun of me because she said frequent is not a word.

And I was like, oh, okay.

So then I’ve been saying it as, I frequent this place.

But I was listening to this British podcast, and one of the hosts actually pronounces it for Quent.

So now I don’t know who is right.

Okay.

We like this.

What podcast was it, just so we know?

It’s called Answer Me This.

Oh, yeah.

She does a great show.

Yeah.

Top-notch stuff.

Ellen Zaltzman, right?

Yes.

Really interesting about the verbs in English is that generally, if we have a two-syllable noun, the first syllable has distress on it.

If we have a two-syllable verb, the second syllable has distress on it.

This is generally tons of exceptions.

And it depends where you live, which dialect you speak, and so forth.

And actually what era you are inhabiting, right?

Get in a time machine, perhaps it’ll be different 100 years ago,

Or even just 50, depending where in the country you are or in the world.

And so I am not surprised to find that you ran into difficulty with this

Because frequent is not a strong candidate for the typical example of a verb

Whose second syllable has stress on it.

That’s what’s happening there.

But in any case, so this rule generally applies, but it’s not universal,

And it’s kind of catch-as-catch-can in English.

It has moved faster in some dialects than it has in others to kind of standardize this.

We have, as I’ve mentioned before, these conflicting things happening in English

Where we strive to make the English more like itself.

We try to remove the irregularities and make it behave a little more consistently.

And so some of the verbs are doing that quite nicely, but some of them are not.

Okay, so it’s not a matter of British versus American English.

No, it’s not at all.

Not across the whole spectrum of two-syllable verbs and nouns.

It isn’t.

There’s a really great page, by the way.

I don’t usually say this about Wikipedia, but I’m going to say this.

But under the entry for heteronyms on Wikipedia, there’s a really great list of these words where the noun and the verb are spelled the same, but they have stress on the different syllable.

So there’s something different about the pronunciation when you compare the noun and the verb or the noun and the adjective or the adjective and the verb and so forth.

Cool?

Wow, that’s really interesting.

So I can say frequent.

Yeah, you can say frequent.

No problem with that.

Yes, I say frequent.

Oh, good.

I feel so much better about it now.

So just to be clear here, because I might have misspoke a little earlier, frequent is the verb and frequent is the adjective.

And they have different stress.

Frequent has a stress on the second syllable.

Frequent has the stress on the first syllable.

And they’re not the same word, but they have the same root and have related meanings.

So you could say, I frequent the library, or you could say, I frequent the library?

I think I actually say, I frequent the library.

And it might have been because people gave me the cocked eyebrow when they heard me say frequent.

But you know what I think, Elisa?

I think you should just do it.

Just go for it.

I will.

All right.

I will just do it.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, sure.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling.

All right.

All right.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

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