the article, and other monosyllabic function words are generally pronounced as a unit with the following word: ('I have'), ('the boy'), ('of the word'), ('at table'). Exceptions include 'and', which may be pronounced more distinctly when it has a larger scope than the following word or phrase. Within poetry, of course, the meter determines stress: ('Oh my heart, do not beat uneasily'). Emphasis and contrast may override normal stress. Pronouns frequently take stress because of this. In a simple question like ('Did you see?'), the pronoun hardly needs to be said and is unstressed; compare and ('No, give me). Within a word, a prefix that wasn't heard correctly may be stressed upon repetition: ('No, not over there! Go left, I said!'). Because stress doesn't distinguish words in Esperanto, shifting it to an unexpected syllable calls attention to that syllable, but doesn't cause confusion as it might in English. As in many languages, initialisms behave unusually. When grammatical, they may be unstressed: k.t.p. ('et cetera'); when used as proper names, they tend to be idiosyncratic: or but rarely . This seems to be a way of indicating that the term is not a normal word. However, full acronyms tend to have regular stress: . Lexical tone is not phonemic. Nor is clausal intonation, as question particles and changes in word order serve many of the functions that intonation performs in English. Phonotactics A syllable in Esperanto is generally of the form (s/ŝ)(C)(C)V(C)(C). That is, it may have an onset, of up to three consonants; must have a nucleus of a single vowel or diphthong (except in onomatopoeic words such as zzz!), and may have a coda of zero to one (occasionally two) consonants. Any consonant may occur initially, with the exception of j before i (though there is now one word that violates this restriction, ('Yiddish') which contrasts with "of an offspring"). Any consonant except h may close a syllable, though coda ĝ and ĵ are rare in monomorphemes (they contrast in 'age' vs. 'thing'). Within a morpheme, there may be a maximum of four sequential consonants, as for example in ('teaches'), ('to the right'). Long clusters generally include a sibilant such as s or one of the liquids l or r. Geminate consonants generally only occur in polymorphemic words, such as ('short'), ('to flop down'), ('to mis-write'); in ethnonyms such as ('a Finn'), ('a Gaul') (now more commonly ); in