As an American, I feel like I stress both syllables about equally, or slightly more stressed on the second. “We at the HO-tel, MOtel, holiday inn!”
Deep South resident here (Alabama, born and bred), and I say “ho-TEL.” However, a fair number of folks in this area say “HO-tel.”
Interestingly, though, I think the pronunciation of “motel” is usually “MO-tel.” Not sure how much the phrase “no-tell motel” (which refers to a cheap place to engage in shenanigans) might have to do with that.
“Motel” is also a portmanteau of “hotel” and “motor,” the latter of which is pronounced “MO-tor.”
I think I would change my emphasis of “hotel” in a phrase, depending on how it scans. For instance, there’s a TV show called Hotel Hell; in that case, I think I would emphasize the first syllable.
My dialect is originally from central Ohio. I think both syllables are equally emphasized, with some variance due to the surrounding context. Similar to “Nobel”.
As a New Yorker, I say “get outta my hoTEL room, jerk, I’m sleepin’ heah.”
How about equal stress? “Ho-tel mo-tel Holiday Inn…now if your girl starts actin’ up, then you take her friend.”
They’re livin’ it up at the HO-TEL CALifornia.
ho-TEL
ho-TEL room
HO-tel room key
Man, English is screwed up.
Sure, but that doesn’t really have any bearing on where the stress falls in a portmanteau. It’ll fall where speakers decide it’s most natural. That said, Merriam-Webster shows motel as having the stress on the second syllable:
Same with dictionary.com
Same with Wiktionary. However, Wiktionary also list the first-syllable stress pronunciation of hotel, and notes it as being Southern American English.
I pronounce motel with stress patterns similar to hotel: it’s either about equal or slight more stress on the second syllable.
Other than Hotel California, when I first saw the thread title I “heard” a song lyric in my head, but it took me a while to track down the song. I remembered it wa HOtel room, but in reality the syllables are pretty much evenly stressed.
(Words are around 2:58 in, and I never expected the music video to be about playing with a corpse.)
Same. Ho-TEL room, HO-tel Hell.
I would have thought it is almost impossible to put more stress on the second syllable, unless you are actually pronouncing it otell.
This is absolutely correct. I am not sure if the phenomenon has a name, but normally an adjunct noun is stressed over the noun it modifies. This well illustrated by the (true, as it happens) sentence: The brown building on the McGill campus is the Brown building.
Once I was trying to decide whether north was an adjective or a noun adjunct in the phrase north Atlantic, I realized that the emphasis was on Atlantic so it was an adjective. On the other hand, north is emphasized in North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so it is a noun there. The interesting thing is that I could not query my internal grammar but had to imagine invoking it to answer these questions.
Incidentally it is hotel room to me all the way.
1:55: “You stupid HO-tel manager!”
I’m not sure if it’s a general term or is specific to noun/verb pairs, but the name I’ve seen for that phenomenon (changing the part of speech by accenting a different syllable) is just called “stress shift.”
The first syllable stress in these pairs denotes the noun form. Stressing the second makes it a verb:
PERmit/perMIT
OBject/obJECT
REbel/reBEL
PROgress/proGRESS
PREsent/preSENT
CONtest/conTEST
CONduct/conDUCT
ENvelope/enVELope
There are, of course, tons more. I specifically chose, for all but one of these, pairs where the meanings are closely related. (Object is the one that isn’t so close). But there are some where the relationship between the words’ meanings is not obvious, or is at least more distant. Content, entrance, converse, subject are examples.
Hotel room is an interesting one because it seems to break the pattern of stress shift between the noun and adjective or adjunct noun use of hotel.
As a noun, it’s always stressed on the second syllable for me. When it’s used as a modifier, I think the stress reliably moves to the first syllable, except when it’s part of a set phrase. Hotel hell, hotel California, even something like “Hotel del Mar” or “she works a hotel front desk job.”
Lastly, there’s a difference to my ear between the Southern version of the HOtel pronunciation and the version I use or hear in “HOtel Hell.”
Lifelong Midwesterner here - I pronounce it as you do, so no, probably not a “Midwestern thing”. Then again, the Midwest is a large region, and I’m from the north end of it. Maybe it’s more Southern?
In actual usage you will be understood no matter which version you use, and I suspect most won’t care either way as that is well within the normal usage for native speakers in the US.
I’ll just point out that Ray Steven’s dialect is more Southern than Northern.
We seem to be arriving at a consensus this is more of Southern or Southern Midwest variation.
That’s likely because people from Detroit say DEE-troit and not the French pronunciation of deh-TOIS or the French-influenced De-TROIT.
There are a number of US cities that have different emphasis/pronunciation than you might expect, such say Cairo, Illinois which is say KAY-ro, not KI-ro, and New Madrid, Missouri which is said New MAW-drid and not like the city in Spain, Ma-DRID.
Also Aloha Oregon, pronounced ah-LOW-uh, not ah-LOW-ha as in the original Hawaiian.
NEW-urk New Jersey and new-ARK Delaware.
Are those still a thing? I thought they were pretty much eradicated from Anglo-Saxon culture with Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.