why the word alegria has stress?

Question

why the word Alegría has stress? this word is grave and finishs with A that is vocal ,so does not need to stress!!!

Thank you

Answer 1

Is that because the ía is a diphthong and counts as 1 vowel?

Where can I find more information on Spanish diphthongs? They confuse me.

Answer 2

"Algunas palabras se acentúan para 'romper' diptongos. Es decir, la palabra tiene dos vocales juntas que no se pronuncian como un diptongo, sino como vocales separadas. Para indicar esa separación, se usa un acento gráfico"

I took this explanation from a web site. I couldn't find it in English.

Basically, the tilde is there to break the diphthong. If you don't put it, then the word wouldn't be properly pronounced when reading it, because the last syllable would be "gria" instead of only "a". If the tilde is not there, it would then be pronounced as "alégria" (no tilde. Just to show where the stress is) and that's not correct.

Answer 3

With the accent the word has four syllables:

a - le - grí - a

If it did not have an accented í, it woud have only three syllables, but a - le - gria is not a word.

Answer 4

Because that is where you are expected to put the stress on the word, ie the last syllable. If the accent was not there the stress would fall on the penultimate syllable, ie the "e" as in alEgria

Do you mean that without the accent, the penultimate syllable would be the "E"? With the accented í, the penultimate moves to there. - chaparrito, Jan 15, 2010

Answer 5

I don't see in the dictionary where "alergia" carries any unusual stress. Perhaps you are thinking of "alérgico"?

You looked up the wrong word, it is alegría. - Eddy, Jan 15, 2010

Yeah...I'm not fully funtional in typing the special characters yet, and it didn't come up when I typed the first few letters. I assumed it didn't exist. My bad! - gadjetman, Jan 15, 2010