Stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages
Today I learned something really cool, which is that while English is a stress-timed language, where each word has a stressed syllable, French is syllable-timed and has almost no stress at all within words. This explains why French words tend to sound weird to me when said in English – because in English, there’s a need to assign a stress. In French, it might be cli-ché, but in English, it’s cli-CHÉ.
This is also why the “é” sound keeps getting mispronounced, because people keep trying to stress it.
Most interestingly, it means that the concept of iambic meter (or of a metrical foot in general) is kinda useless in French. In French we just count syllables.