If you think you know how to complain about airports, just listen to Benjamin Bratton's beatnik spoken-word fugue of polysyllables.
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Virgil's decorous Latin gets translated into a language which calls for eloquent Latinate polysyllables: the Sibyl flings the guard-dog Cerberus "a dumpling of soporific honey".
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He piles up samples — the title track of "Jewelry" juggles electric-piano jazz and pitched-up Hebrew-language pop — and slings polysyllables and puns with the raspy conviction he learned from Nas: "In elementary, my favorite subject was P.E. — Public Enemy," he raps.
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Mizo contains many analyzable polysyllables, which are polysyllabic units in which the individual syllables have meaning by themselves. In a true monosyllabic language, polysyllables are mostly confined to compound words, such as "lighthouse". The first syllables of compounds tend over time to be de-stressed, and may eventually be reduced to prefixed consonants. The word nuntheihna ("survival") is composed of nung ("to live"), theih ("possible") and na (a nominalising suffix); likewise, theihna means "possibility".
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Other than in family names, the Franco-Provençal legacy survives primarily in placenames. Many are immediately recognizable, ending in . These suffixes are vestiges of an old medieval orthographic practice indicating the stressed syllable of a word. In polysyllables, 'z' indicates a paroxytone (stress on penultimate syllable) and 'x' indicates an oxytone (stress on last syllable).
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Some others like Matlatzinca and Chichimeca Jonaz only have the level tones and no combination. center In some languages stress influences tone, for example in Pame only stressed syllables have a tonal contrast. In Chatino where stress falls predictably on the last syllable of polysyllables, tone is also only distinguished on the last syllable. In Mazahua the opposite occurs and all syllables except the final stressed one distinguishes tone.
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Ido omits two consonants used in Esperanto, and , opting to use the similar sounds and exclusively. Ido's rule for determining stress is regular, but more complex than Esperanto's. In Esperanto, all words are stressed on the second-to-last syllable: radio, televido. In Ido all polysyllables are stressed on the second-to-last syllable except for verb infinitives, which are stressed on the last syllable—skolo, kafeo and lernas for "school", "coffee" and the present tense of "to learn", but irar, savar and drinkar for "to go", "to know" and "to drink".
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Thus in a three-syllable word, the first syllable has secondary stress; in a four-syllable word, the second syllable has secondary stress; in a five- syllable word, the first and third syllables have secondary stress, and so on. Long polysyllables are not often used in conversation. Compounds, however, preserve the stress patterns of the constituent words. Thus , the name of a kind of cookie (literally 'bird's nest'), is pronounced , with secondary stress on the second rather than the first syllable, because it is composed of the words ('nest') and ('bird').
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Jon Dolan of Rolling Stone dismissed it as a "vitriol-tsunami of a record". In a positive review, AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that Aguilera "feels comfortable in this familiar, slightly freshened territory". Simon Price of The Independent felt that the album's "best moments are its electro- pop numbers". Kitty Empire of The Observer characterized its subject matter as "wiffle of the highest order", but wrote that "one of the pleasures of Aguilera is that she can use polysyllables, even when talking the rot that fills women's mags".
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Two numbers are distinguished in Bulgarian–singular and plural. A variety of plural suffixes is used, and the choice between them is partly determined by their ending in singular and partly influenced by gender; in addition, irregular declension and alternative plural forms are common. Words ending in (which are usually feminine) generally have the plural ending , upon dropping of the singular ending. Of nouns ending in a consonant, the feminine ones also use , whereas the masculine ones usually have for polysyllables and for monosyllables (however, exceptions are especially common in this group).
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Lawrence now began to specialise in planning, parliamentary and divorce cases. Time magazine described Lawrence as a "puckish, mousy little man with a mind as orderly as a calculating machine". Cullen describes him similarly as "used to digesting boring technicalities", though Robert Hounsome highlights his "magnetic oratory style. 'Certainly no-one, other than his brothers (both in the legal profession) can make such polysyllables as "cerebral" and "respiratory" sound like something out of Keats'"Robert Hounsome, The Very Nearly Man, 2006, page 183 He first achieved judicial office in 1948 with his appointment as Recorder (a part-time judge) of Tenterden.
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Karr's Pushcart Award-winning essay, "Against Decoration", was originally published in the quarterly review Parnassus (1991) and later reprinted in Viper Rum. In this essay, Karr took a stand in favor of content over poetic style. She argued emotions need to be directly expressed, and clarity should be a watch-word: characters are too obscure, the presented physical world is often "foggy" (that is imprecise), references are "showy" (both non-germane and overused), metaphors overshadow expected meaning, and techniques of language (polysyllables, archaic words, intricate syntax, "yards of adjectives") only "slow a reader's understanding". Another essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer", was originally published in Poetry (2005).
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In Danish, the plural endings are -er, -e or zero-ending. The choice of ending is difficult to predict (although -er is especially common in polysyllables, loanwords and words ending in unstressed e; -e is most usual in monosyllables; and zero-ending is most usual in neuter monosyllables). In Norwegian, the plural suffix -e is used too, but the system is rather regularized, since it is only nouns ending with -er in uninflected form that get -e in indefinite plural form, and this is current for both masculine, feminine and neuter nouns; en skyskraper – skyskrapere "a skyscraper – skyscrapers"; en hamburger – hamburgere "a hamburger – hamburgers"; et monster – monstre "a monster – monsters"; et senter – sentre "a center – centers". The ending -er is dominant in masculine/feminine nouns and some neuters with several syllables, while zero-ending is prevalent in neuter gender monosyllables.
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Yuen Ren Chao, seated, and his wife Buwei Yang Chao (1889–1981), Chinese-American physician and author who introduced the terms "pot sticker" and "stir fry" in her first book, edited by Chao When in the US in 1921, Chao recorded the Standard Chinese pronunciation gramophone records distributed nationally, as proposed by Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation. He is the author of one of the most important standard modern works on Chinese grammar, A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), which was translated into Chinese separately by Lü Shuxiang (吕叔湘) in 1979 and by Ting Pang-hsin (丁邦新) in 1980. It was an expansion of the grammar chapters in his earlier textbooks, Mandarin Primer and Cantonese Primer. He was co-author of the Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese, which was the first dictionary to characterize Chinese characters as bound (used only in polysyllables) or free (permissible as a monosyllabic word).
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