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THE SOUND SYSTEMS OF ENGLISH AND HUNGARIAN an effect on the preceding one), while in English it is normally progressive; cf. szab — szabtam vs. rob — robbed and top — topped. However, regressive assimilation in English may occur across word boundaries: of course, use your eyes, did you, etc. 3.4 LETTER-TO-SOUND CORRESPONDENCES The difficulty of acquiring a good English pronunciation is enhanced by the irregularities of English spelling. There are certain rules, or rather tendencies for letter-to-sound correspondences (see Nädasdy 2006, Koväcs-Siptär 1991 and Kovacs-—Siptar 2010), yet English pronunciation depends, to a large extent, on lexical knowledge: you simply have to know how a certain word is pronounced. It is not enough to know how to articulate the vowels /e/ and /z/: you have to know which one is used in a particular word, e.g., in the word any. Stress is very important for pronunciation: if you know where the stress is in a word, you can guess its pronunciation — but stress is not marked in spelling. Vowel alternations (reduction of full vowels) depend on stress. 3.5 SUPRASEGMENTAL FEATURES Perhaps even more important than the articulation of individual sounds is the difference in the suprasegmental features of English and Hungarian. English stress is difficult to predict and is influenced by suffixes. In many words it is stress that decides whether it is used as a verb or a noun: import, export, increase, decrease, etc. (See Koväcs-Siptär 1991). There are degrees of stress which influence vowel quality and rhythm. In phrases and sentences there is a tendency towards late stress: Compare: a fan,tastic ex perience — ’fantasztikus élmény I’m not ‚well today. — Ma nem vagyok jól. A very important component of pronunciation is rhythm. Hungarian is syllable-timed, i.e. every syllable takes about the same amount of time to produce. English is stress-timed, i.e. strong, stressed syllables occur at regular intervals, and there is roughly the same amount of time between strong syllables, while the vowels in weak syllables are reduced. Consequently, the more weak syllables there are between two stressed ones, the more rapidly they are spoken. As a result, function words in English have strong and weak forms. From among the many differences between English and Hungarian intonation here we shall mention only one. English yes-no questions have a falling intonation, while Hungarian tends to use a rise: Are you coming tomorrow? — Holnap eljössz? + 43 ¢
