Comment on The Time Being

• fbn@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  a common thing people with autism and adhd is auditory processing issues, so it could work auditorily for them.

  i said it out loud in a few different ways and it sounded the same to me, but it could be a regional thing ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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  • hakase@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s really interesting that they sound the same to you! I’d expect both to have merged to the “for the TIME being” pronunciation if that were the case - does that match your intuition?

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• TachyonTele@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  You’re over pronouncing it. You just say it normally and the joke works perfectly fine vocally.

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  • hakase@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    My comment was based on fluent speech, not careful speech.

    I’m entertaining the idea that some of the commenters here may speak varieties (or even idiolects) where the two pronunciations have merged, but I think the more likely explanation is that they’re laypeople who (like many native speakers) aren’t able to detect stress contrasts in their own speech.

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    • TachyonTele@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      Anywho, I know who not to tell puns to…

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      • hakase@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

        I love puns! I just thought this was a good opportunity to drop some interesting linguistic knowledge about prosody.

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• zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Interesting, I process time being as a set idiomatic phrase rather than a modifier+ so there’s no need for emphasis on one part or the other. And time being as similar to human being wouldn’t get emphasis unless it was contrasting with a different kind of being. But I also think we’re muddying different types of stress, namely word stress vs prosodic stress. I think your reading has to do with the latter but your example is about the former.

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  • hakase@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Idiomatic phrases usually (but not always) retain the stress pattern of their original syntax even after they lexicalize. See: “the CAT’s out of the BAG” vs. “the CLAM’S out of the POND” and “kick the BUCKet” vs. “beat the MONkey”.

    So, while I agree with you that “time being” (and probably all of “for the time being”, for that matter) is idiomatic, its prosody has fossilized from its original syntax in which “being” modified “time”.

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