Irregular penultimate stress in English words from classical sources

Question

Wikipedia says about stress in Latinate English words:

In words of three or more syllables, stress falls either on the penult or the antepenult (third from the end), according to these criteria:

• If the penult contains a short vowel in an open syllable, the stress falls on the antepenult: e.g. stá.mi.na, hy.pó.the.sis.
• If the penult contains a long vowel; a diphthong; a closed syllable (with any length of vowel); or is followed by z, the stress falls on the penult.

[...] The fact that decorum is stressed on the penult, and exodus on the antepenult, is a fact about each of these words that must be memorized separately (unless one is already familiar with the Classical quantities, and in the former case, additionally with the fact that decus -ŏris n. with short -o- syllable became in late Latin decus/decor -ōris m. with long -o- syllable: 'Dómine, diléxi decórem domus tuæ').

However, English speakers often pronounce words like this with penult stress instead:

• stigmata (coexists with antepenult-stressed variant)
• schemata (coexists with antepenult-stressed variant)
• Uranus (coexists with antepenult-stressed variant)
• uroboros/ouroboros (Wikipedia: /jʊərɵˈbɒrəs/, /ɔːˈrɒbɔrəs/; Collins: /uːˈrɒbəˌrɒs; ˌuːrəˈbɒrəs/)

Is there any linguistic explanation of this? Native English words don't seem to me to have a general preference for the penultimate syllable, but I may be wrong — please tell me if there's evidence for this.

It does seem to me that for many English speakers, penult stress is the default for pronouncing foreign words. For example, in the Anglicized pronunciation of words from Japanese, Japanese pitch-accent seems to be totally ignored, and penult stress is common (but not universal; see "samurai," "tycoon," and some pronunciations of "haiku" for counterexamples). Has there been any linguistic research that confirms this idea? If so, do we have any idea of the conditions under which this tendency applies to the pronunciation of a word (does it depend on apparent language of origin, phonological structure, analogy to other specific English words with the same spelling) and how long it has been active historically?

Answer 1

To summarize, I don't know. But the question seems a little fuzzy, to me. Are you concerned with predicting how such words will be borrowed into English given their source forms, or is it about how English speakers (not necessarily the borrowers) will say them? And are you just looking at the spelling of the English word?

In the SPE analysis, "decorum" could be assigned an underlying form with a tense penult, and "exodus" could be assigned an underlying form with a lax penult, and that would predict the correct stresses, on the penult and antepenult, respectively. The fact that they are both spelled with "o" in the penult is neither here nor there. I don't know how they were borrowed.

"Tycoon" and "samurai" aren't much like the other examples you're concerned with that have their last stress on the antepenult or penult, because these words have stress on their ultimate syllables, just as one would expect, since the ultimate syllables have tense vowels.

Answer 2

Consider the examples you have given more closely. Surely, the key is that in the variants with antepenultimate stress, the penultimate vowel sound is reduced to a near-schwa or schwa sound. Conversely, in the penultimate stress variants, the vowel will likely be Anglicized in a different way. Note that in either pronunciation of "Uranus", the "a" sounds nothing like a Latin a.

In this way, the general principle of the rule you cite is maintained.

When we initially hear foreign words, we will naturally try to approximate the pronunciation. There is no good reason why variant pronunciations of foreign-origin words shouldn't exist, especially when English pronunciation itself is so varied - no doubt influencing the pronunciation of the foreign word.