Accentos prosodicos

Question

Hello!

As a non-native speaker I often have trouble determining which syllable in a Spanish word will take the accent, or emphasis, of the voice.

I was wondering if someone could help me determine which syllable in each of the following words takes the emphasis when pronounced en habla lenta por si solas:

1. Perpendicular: Per-pen-di-cu-lar
2. Instrucciones: ins-truc-cion-es
3. Tremendo: tre-men-do
4. Despilfarrador: des-pil-fa-rra-dor

Thank you very much in advance for the help! =]

Answer 1

• Perpendicular: Per-pen-di-cu-lar The word is aguda
• Instrucciones: ins-truc-cion-es The word is grave (llana)
• Tremendo: tre-men-do The word is grave (llana)
• Despilfarrador: des-pil-fa-rra-dor The word is aguda

That is unless you omitted some accent marks which I am checking on now. No, they are ok. None are esdrújula nor sobresdrújula

here are the rules, by the way.

There are really only 2 rules to worry about. Determine if the word is aguda or grave (llana).

If it is esdrújula or sobresdrújula it will have an accent mark on it so you know where it is stressed.

The only other thing that you have to worry about when deciding how to pronounce the word is if the person misspelled the word (omitted a necessary accent mark) which unfortunately happens a lot on this site (even with the natives). Let's just hope that they are typos.

Case in point: the word is prosódicos (and accentos only has one c...acentos)

Answer 2

Hi there:

Careful with:

Ins-truc-CIO-nes

A word is aguda when:

It has no accent mark and it doesn't end with vowel, -n nor -s

it has an accent mark in the last syllable

A word is llana if:

it has no accent mark and it ends with vowel, -n, or -s

it has an accent mark in the penultimate syllable

I knew that I should have double checked the syllabification. - 0074b507, Dec 16, 2011