A continuous, annoying sound has been with soccer fans throughout June 2010. That's the vuvuzela from the World Cup stadiums. This sound has been so powerful that almost all broadcasters around the world have been unable to silence them. You may wonder how this relates to our class - not necessarily by how it sounds but by how the word itself does. You may recall that as a kind of golden rule of word stress, if a word's primary stress falls on the third syllable, there will be a secondary stress on the first one. So this is how this Tswana word should be pronounced in English: 'vuvu'zela. However, if you don't feel confident enough to pronounce this non-English-sounding word, you can opt for stadium horn, which is the English equivalent, only that you will need to remember its stress pattern. If we go by the rule we mentioned in class for a combination of noun + noun compound (namely, what type of thing is the N2?), we'll obtain a single-stressed 'stadium horn. Can you think of other World-Cup-related terms and their stress patterns? I'm eager to listen to you on this post!
