Time-traveling pronunciation

While thinking about alliterative verse, I came across an interesting case. Alliteration, in the traditional Old English form, doesn’t have to be on the first consonant in the words — it’s on the first consonant in the stressed syllables. A thousand years later, in Modern English it’s not rare to have more than one syllable in a word that gets stress, though the others are less emphasized. (24% of the words in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary have a secondary stress in them.) We still alliterate on the stressed syllable, in principle. Which brings me to the word “technological”. The way I say it, the primary stress  is on “log”, and the Wise Clerks of Pittsburgh agree with me. Let’s try to alliterate with it:

• “Technological Language” sounds like alliteration, and it matches the Old English form.
• “Technological Treatise” sounds like alliteration, too.

It’s like the second word causes a change in how we hear the first. The secondary stress on “tech” gets promoted. The presence of “Treatise” seems to move the primary accent from the third syllable “log” to the first syllable “tech”. But I’ve already read the first word — This is time travel!

By: K. Aainsqatsi at Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Maybe I can see a physical mechanism here. When I read, I “hear” the words in my head, but I sight-read the words much faster than that. Reading is different from systems described by the Theory of Relativity, because signals are primarily at the speed of (thinking about) sound, but there are also light signals that can exceed that maximum speed. Which makes the “sound cone” permeable, unlike the light cone we know about from Relativity.

So my eyes see the next word before I read the line into memory, and therefore later words in a line can affect the earlier ones. I’m sure every theater director already knew this.

Post Scriptum

The same thing happens with “proctological”, but in this case the dilemma can be resolved easily by never using that word in a poem.