Why is English a stress-timed language?

looney_tunes

Languages can be classified as stress-timed, syllable-timed, or mora-timed. "In a stress-timed language, syllables may last different amounts of time, but there is perceived to be a fairly constant amount of time (on average) between consecutive stressed syllables. Stress-timing is sometimes called Morse-code rhythm. Stress-timing is strongly related to vowel reduction processes. English, German, Dutch, European Portuguese, Russian, and Czech are typical stress-timed languages, as are some southern dialects of Italian." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony Oct 21 09, 1:42 PM