Rhymes talk:English/eɪʃən

Long page

This is going to be a long page. A search of a word list I have gives 2731 words ending in -ation! Of course, this will include non-rhymes like "ration", but at some time this page is going to become unmanageably large. -- Paul G 14:36, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

Looking more closely, this list includes lots of phrases and variant spellings, so there aren't quite that many after all. -- Paul G 14:41, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

Stress patterns

Another point - I have deleted the comments against the words where the stress was queried. The stress is on the last syllable of these words, but they have secondary (or in the case of flocci...cation, tertiary, etc) stress. The primary stress is still on the "a" of "-ation". -- Paul G 14:39, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

Sometimes with longer words it's hard to tell which is the primary stress. There's also often more than one common way to stress such words. By the way, I'm pretty sure that linguistically, English is only considered to have primary and secondary stress. Words can have multiple secondary stresses. I want to read up a bit more about it though.

Now, on "conglomeration" I thought it seemed to have more stress on 2 than 4 but the phrase "conglomeration at the station" is a 100% rhyme so I guess I was wrong. "reincarnation", however, is often stressed on the 1st syllable - pretty common with "re-" and a few other prefixes I'd say. — Hippietrail 15:06, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

Hm, I can see that this might be true of some re- words. My dictionaries (the OED and Chambers, neither of which shows secondary stress) both put the stress on the penultimate syllable.

I think it might be because of the stress patterns of these words are different - if I use dashes for "long" (stressed) syllables and dots for "short" (unstressed) syllables, as they are referred to in meter, then we have .-.-. for "conglomeration" but -..-. for "reincarnation". This difference might give the impression that the latter sound like it is stressed on the first syllable when this actually carries the secondary stress. — Paul G 15:13, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

A further point - poets will concentrate on meter as well as rhyme, so "conglomeration makes the station" (.-.-.-.-.) is a series of iambi (.-) followed by a final short syllable, while "reincarnation is Michael's vocation" (-..-..-..-.) is a series of trochees (-..) followed by a final short syllable. That's prosody for you :) So in the end, the poet will not be too concerned about where the primary stress falls, provided the meter sounds correct. -- Paul G 15:20, 30 May 2004 (UTC)