Originally Posted by
guy153
Good question. In English the stress is either on the second to last syllable or the third to last, if the second to last is short (actually that's the rule for Latin, English is probably more complicated and irregular than this, but it follows this pattern some of the time). In bicycle the stress is on "bi", third from last. But in "bitonal" for example it's on "ton", second from last, because that's a long "o". The thing with "motorcycle" is we really pronounce it like it was two words "MOtor CYcle". Because that second word only has two syllables we end up with the stress on the "CY", second last. If we treated it like one word we'd say moTORsickle.
Even weirder is tri-sickle but uni-sikel. Why not unIsickle? I think English basically doesn't like words with more than three syllables very much, although there are some, like esTABlishment.
Would suck to not be a native speaker of English and have to learn all this ****.
I acknowledge that in linguistics "rules" are more of a quasi-science, or "generally applicable", rather than actual rules as we'd expect in math, science or computer science. But that said, I think that rule there should be stress the first noun in a compound noun. ie, MOtorcycle is a compound noun, not two words, and follows that general rule. The second syllable is stressed (in your example moTORcycle) if it's a compound *adjective*. Or compound verb. I respectfully submit that you've gotten the rule wrong here.
I've never before heard of altering the vowel to long or short based on the phoneme's position as second or third syllable, although apparently that's the rage now on the internet. I remain skeptical, not just from searching out exceptions but because exceptions to that are so common.
Recycle comes to mind.It's two syllables (to the "i") with a prefix, just like bicycle. It's not easier or more natural to say "bi sickle" than "re sike al". One might stand on noun vs verb there, I'll grant that "long I in third position in a compound noun" would explain it. But that sounds a whole lot like fitting a rule to match a specific word,