Some Word Endings Secretly Move the Stress

Hungarian always lands stress on the first syllable, so it's tempting to treat every English word the same way. But certain endings have a fixed effect: adding -tion, -ic, -ity, or -ious often pulls the main stress onto the syllable right before them, no matter where the stress was in the base word. Think of 'photograph' (PHO-to-graph) becoming 'photoGRAPHic', or 'economy' (e-CO-no-my) becoming 'ecoNOMic'. Try this: take three words you already know — 'democrat', 'critic', 'origin' — and say their -ic or -ic-ish cousins out loud, exaggerating the new stressed syllable. Notice how the vowel in that syllable gets clearer and louder while the others shrink. This pattern shows up constantly in academic and news English, so learning just a handful of suffix rules can fix dozens of words at once. Small rule, big payoff — keep collecting these patterns as you read.