Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2004

I tend to pronounce the "-ate" noun as an "-ut" (cut), but agree that the
verb endings tend to rhyme with "kate".  I assume there is a bit more stress
on or lenghening of the verb endings than on the noun endings.  That verb
ending "a" is under stress  when the "-tion", or the gerundive ending are
used.

Oh, I am sure there are dozens more, but this is a good sample -- speaking
of AmE, of course.

It seems to me that it's the same phenomenon as noun/verbs of the "permit"
class: verbs attract stress to their final syllables for some reason. The
difference between the "advocate" class and the "permit"  class, I think,
is just that in three-syllable words, when stress is added to the final
syllable, the first syllable can retain its stress because of the reduced
syllable that intervenes. In a two-syllable word, the first syllable can't
retain its stress if the second syllable is to gain stress, and so it
becomes reduced.

-Aaron J. Dinkin
Dr. Whom

Not just nouns receive reduced stress on the final syllable -- it's also
true of participial adjectives ending in <-ate>.  Such forms originally
appeared in Middle English as anglicizations of Latin participles (many
of these participial adjectives ended up being used as nouns as well).
In Early Modern English <-ate> became a productive suffix for causative
verbs, leading to verb-adjective and verb-noun homographic pairs.  

Higgins, John (1984). "It or ate; a note on the pronunciation of words
ending in -ate.", ELT Journal 38, 1, p. 50-51.

See also <http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/whytranscription.htm>
(John Wells, "Why phonetic transcription is important"), under "4.
Ambiguous spelling".

Many more verb-adjective/noun pairs (animate, approximate, articulate,
aspirate, associate, confederate, conglomerate, etc.) are listed here:

http://www.marlodge.supanet.com/wordlist/homogrph.html#ate
http://rec-puzzles.org/new/sol.pl/language/english/pronunciation/homograph/homographs