The stress in a word is when you emphasize a syllable as you pronounce it. As you probably are aware, knowing which syllables to stress is an important part of pronouncing an incantation correctly. If you get the stress wrong, the spell might not work at all, the spell may backfire, or you might accidentally cast another spell entirely. Fortunately, the stress pattern of Latin words--including Latin-based incantations--is entirely predictable. That is, you should be able to figure out which syllable is stressed simply by looking at the structure of the word. By the end of this chapter, you should know all you need to know to figure out how to tell which syllable is stressed in a Latin word. However, before we get into that, we need to know a little bit about Latin syllables. 

Syllables

Syllables consist of three parts: an onset, a nucleus, and a coda. The nucleus is the vowel, in the middle of a syllable, while the onset is any consonants that comes before the vowel, and the nucleus is any consonants that come after the vowel. 

There are two kinds of syllables in the world's languages: light and heavy syllables. Light syllables have a short vowel and no consonants in the coda. Heavy syllables have a long vowel or at least one consonant in the coda. Long vowels in Latin are often marked with a macron (ā). Diphthongs are also considered long vowels. 

But if there's two syllables back to back, how do you tell which consonants are in the coda of the first syllable, and which are in the onset of the next syllable? You do this: first, you put as many consonants as you can in the onset of the second syllable, then you put what's left in the coda of the first syllable. What you are allowed to put in the onset of a syllable is different in every language. In English, in some cases, you can put up to three consonants in the onset, as in strengths! But Latin had much stricter rules about what was allowed in the onset than English. Most of the time, they only allow one sound in the onset. Remember, this is one sound, not one letter. The letter X represents two sounds, and there are some sounds that are spelled with two letters (CH, PH, TH). However, Latin allowed two consonants in an onset if the first consonant was a stop (P, B, T, D, K, or G) and the second consonant was L or R. 

Stress

**to be written**

Summary

The steps to figuring out stress in Latin are like this, then:

1. Find all the vowels in the word. Each vowel is a syllable nucleus. Remember that diphthongs only count as one vowel.
2. How many syllables does the word have? If it is only one or two syllables long, put the stress on the first syllable. If the word has three or more syllables, continue on.
   
3. Figure out the onset of each syllable. To do this, look at the consonants that come before each vowel. Include ONE consonant SOUND in the onset.
   
4. If the onset you included was an L or an R, you can include one more consonant before that, but only if it is a stop (P, B, T, D, K, or G).
5. Before each onset, mark a break showing where one syllable ends and the next begins. Any leftover consonants belong to the coda of the preceding syllable.
6. Look at the second-last syllable. Is the syllable light or heavy? Remember, a light syllable does not have a long vowel, a diphthong, or a coda consonant. If it is light, put the stress on this syllable.
7. If the second-last syllable is heavy, put the stress on the third-from-last syllable.
8. Stress should always be on either the second-last or third-from-last syllable, unless the word only has one syllable. 

**to be continued**

-laxing of short vowels in medial position