Polish is the expansion of the usage of glottal stops. In the past, initial vowels were pronounced with an initial voiceless glottal fricative (so that Ala was pronounced ), pre-iotation (so that igła ('needle') was pronounced ), or pre-labialization (so that oko 'eye' was pronounced ). Dialectal variation In some Polish dialects (found in the eastern borderlands and in Upper Silesia) there is an additional voiced velar fricative //, represented by the letter . It may be actually a voiced glottal fricative [] for some speakers, especially word-finally. In most varieties of Polish, both and represent . Some eastern dialects also preserve the velarized dental lateral approximant, , which corresponds to in most varieties of Polish. Those dialects also can palatalize to in every position, but standard Polish does so only allophonically before and . and are also common realizations in native speakers of Polish from Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. notes that students of Polish philology were hostile towards the lateral variant of , saying that it sounded "unnatural" and "awful". Some of the students also said that they perceived the lateral as a variant of , which, he further notes, along with the necessity of deciding from context whether the sound meant was or , made people hostile towards the sound. On the other hand, some Poles view the lateral variant with nostalgia, associating it with the elegant culture of interwar Poland. In the Masurian dialect and some neighboring dialects, mazurzenie occurs: postalveolar merge with the corresponding dentals unless is spelled (a few centuries ago, it represented a fricative trill , distinct from ; only the latter sound occurs in modern Polish). Stress The predominant stress pattern in Polish is penultimate: the second-last syllable is stressed. Alternating preceding syllables carry secondary stress: in a four-syllable word, if the primary stress is on the third syllable, there will be secondary stress on the first. Each written vowel represents one syllable although the letter i normally does not represent a vowel when it precedes another vowel (it represents either , palatalization of the preceding consonant, or both depending on analysis; see Polish orthography and the above). Also, the letters u and i sometimes represent only semivowels after another vowel, as in autor ('author'), mostly in loanwords (so not in native nauka 'science, the act of learning', for example, nor in nativized Mateusz 'Matthew'). Some loanwords, particularly from classical languages, have the