Pronunciation of -mente Adverbs

Question

The general rule for Spanish pronunciation is that, barring an accent, words that end with vowels have stresses placed on the second-to-last syllable. However, with adverbs, there seem to be exceptions.

Take frecuentemente. It ends with a vowel, so it appears that the stress should go on MEN. But many dictionaries have spoken examples demonstrating that the stress is on CUEN. I could accept this if it had an accent, but it does not.

You can find this in many other adverbs.

And none of these have accents. It is worth noting that Google's machine recording pronounces extremadamente as ex-tre-ma-da-MEN-te (likely because it has been programmed with the rule mentioned above), but Google's human voiceover for the word pronounces it as ex-tre-MA-da-men-te.

Are -mente adverbs exceptions to the pronunciation rules in casual/modern-day speech, or are the voiceovers for these dictionaries pronouncing the words incorrectly?

Answer 1

In the words ending with -mente, everything before -mente is pronounced the same way as in the original word. For example:

• FreCUENte => freCUENte-mente
• SUAve => SUAve-mente
• Ágil => Ágil-mente

But also the accent in MENte is retained so words ending with -mente are pronounced with two accents:

• FreCUENteMENte
• SUAveMENte
• ÁgilMENte
• FÁcilMENte

In the site you are citing, although the written form is not complete, you can hear the feature of the double accent in the human voiceovers. The very few synthesized voiceovers I could hear are wrong.

The rules for the tilde are simple: if the original word has tilde, the composed word will retain it. If the original word doesn't have tilde, the composed word won't have it either.

So we could say that words ending with -mente are pronounced and written as if we had two words but omitting the space (in the written form.)

Here are some of the comments of the RAE about the words ending with -mente

• Los adverbios terminados en «-mente» no son palabras llanas ni esdrújulas o sobresdrújulas, sino palabras con dos acentos prosódicos. Y se tildan si lleva tilde el adjetivo base: «CÁlidaMENte» (cálido) «ÁgilMENte» (ágil), «matemáticaMENte» (matemático).
• La terminación «-mente» de los adverbios formados a partir de adjetivos no es propiamente un sufijo, sino un elemento compositivo (del lat. «mente», ablativo de «mens, mentis» 'ánimo, intención').