A syllable (Greek Greek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical ancient Greek literature and the New Testament of: συλλαβή) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech Speech is the vocalized form of human communication. It is based upon the syntactic combination of lexicals and names that are drawn from very large vocabularies. Each spoken word is created out of the phonetic combination of a limited set of vowel and consonant speech sound units. These vocabularies, the syntax which structures them, and their sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus In phonetics and phonology, the nucleus is the central part of the syllable, most commonly a vowel. In addition to a nucleus, a syllable may begin with an onset and end with a coda, but in most languages the only part of a syllable that is mandatory is the nucleus. The nucleus and coda form the rime of the syllable (most often a vowel In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! [ɑː] or oh! [oʊ], pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! [ʃː], where there is a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. A) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are [p], pronounced with the lips; [t], pronounced with the front of the tongue; [k], pronounced with the back of the tongue; [h], pronounced in the throat; [f] and [s], pronounced by forcing air through a).

Syllables are often considered the phonological Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system. When describing the formal area of study, the term typically describes linguistic analysis either beneath the "building blocks" of words A word is the smallest free form in a language, in contrast to a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning. A word may consist of only one morpheme (e.g. wolf), but a single morpheme may not be able to exist as a free form (e.g. the English plural morpheme -s). They can influence the rhythm of a language Language is a term most commonly used to refer to so called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. By extension the term also refers to the type of human thought process which creates and uses language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic creation, maintenance and use of systems of, its prosody In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of a speaker; whether an utterance is a statement, a question, or a command; whether the speaker is being ironic or sarcastic; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of, its poetic Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning. Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns, lyrics, or prose poetry. It is published in dedicated magazines ( meter, its stress In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense patterns, etc.

Syllablic writing began several hundred years before the first letters The Proto-Sinaitic script, also known as Proto-Canaanite, is the alphabetic script of a number of Middle Bronze Age inscriptions in the Sinai, Middle Egypt, and Canaan. It is ancestral to the Semitic abjads as they developed by the Early Iron Age, and via Phoenician and Aramaic also to nearly all modern alphabets. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur Ur was a city in ancient Sumer, located at the site of modern Tell el-Mukayyar in Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate. Once a coastal city near the mouth of the then Euphrates river on the Persian Gulf, Ur is now well inland, south of the Euphrates on its right bank, 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) from Nasiriyah, Iraq. It is close to the site of ancient Eridu. Ur. This shift from pictograms A pictograph is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Earliest examples of pictographs include ancient or prehistoric drawings or paintings found on rock walls. Pictographs are also used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to considerable extent pictorial in appearance to syllables has been called 'the most important advance in the history of writing Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio'.[1]

A word that consists of a single syllable (like English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of dog) is called a monosyllable (such a word is monosyllabic), while a word consisting of two syllables (like puppy) is called a disyllable (such a word is disyllabic). A word consisting of three syllables (such as wolverine) is called a trisyllable (the adjective form is trisyllabic). A word consisting of more than three syllables (such as rhinoceros) is called a polysyllable (and could be described as polysyllabic), although this term is often used to describe words of two syllables or more.

Contents

Syllable structure

The general structure of a syllable consists of the following segments:

Tree representation of a CVC syllable

In some theories of phonology, these syllable structures are displayed as tree diagrams The term tree diagram refers to a specific type of diagram that has a unique network topology. It can be seen as a specific type of network diagram, which in turn can be seen as a special kind of cluster diagram (similar to the trees found in some types of syntax). Not all phonologists agree that syllables have internal structure; in fact, some phonologists doubt the existence of the syllable as a theoretical entity.[2]

The syllable nucleus is typically a sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract: fricatives and plosives are not sonorants. Vowels are sonorants, as are consonants like /m/ and /l/. Other consonants, like /d/ or /s/, restrict the airflow enough to cause turbulence, and so are non-sonorant. In addition to, usually making a vowel sound, in the form of a monophthong A monophthong is a "pure" vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation; compare diphthong, diphthong In phonology, a diphthong, pronounced /ˈdɪf.θɒŋ/ or /ˈdɪp.θɒŋ/, (from Greek δίφθογγος, diphthongos, literally "two sounds" or "two tones") refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. In most dialects of English, the words eye, boy, and cow contain examples of diphthongs, or triphthong In phonetics, a triphthong is a monosyllabic vowel combination involving a quick but smooth movement of the articulator from one vowel quality to another that passes over a third. While "pure" vowels, or monophthongs, are said to have one target articulator position, diphthongs have two, and triphthongs three, but sometimes sonorant consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are [p], pronounced with the lips; [t], pronounced with the front of the tongue; [k], pronounced with the back of the tongue; [h], pronounced in the throat; [f] and [s], pronounced by forcing air through a like [l] or [r], and only very rarely a non-sonorant.[3] The syllable onset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and the syllable coda (literally 'tail') is the sound or sounds that follow the nucleus. The term rime covers the nucleus plus coda. In the one-syllable English word cat, the nucleus is a (the sound that can be shouted or sung on its own), the onset c, the coda t, and the rime at. This syllable can be abstracted as a consonant-vowel-consonant syllable, abbreviated CVC.

Generally, every syllable requires a nucleus.[4] Onsets are extremely common, and some languages require all syllables to have an onset. (That is, in these languages, a CVC syllable like cat would be possible, but a VC syllable such as at would not.) A coda-less syllable of the form V, CV, CCV, etc. is called an open syllable (or free syllable), while a syllable that has a coda (VC, CVC, CVCC, etc.) is called a closed syllable (or checked syllable). Note that they have nothing to do with open An open vowel is a vowel sound of a type used in nearly all spoken languages . The defining characteristic of an open vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue. The open vowels identified in the International and close vowels A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. All languages allow open syllables, but some, such as Hawaiian The Hawaiian language is a Polynesian language that takes its name from Hawaiʻi, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the state of Hawaii. King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 1839 and 1840, do not have closed syllables.

A heavy syllable In linguistics, syllable weight is the concept that syllables pattern together according to the number and/or duration of segments in the rime. In classical poetry, both Greek and Latin, distinctions of syllable weight were fundamental to the meter of the line is one with a branching rime or branching nucleus – this is a metaphor, based on the nucleus or coda having lines that branch in a tree diagram. In some languages, heavy syllables include both VV (branching nucleus) and VC (branching rime) syllables, contrasted with V, which is a light syllable. In other languages, only VV syllables (ones with a long vowel or diphthong In phonology, a diphthong, pronounced /ˈdɪf.θɒŋ/ or /ˈdɪp.θɒŋ/, (from Greek δίφθογγος, diphthongos, literally "two sounds" or "two tones") refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. In most dialects of English, the words eye, boy, and cow contain examples of diphthongs) are heavy, while both VC and V syllables are light. The difference between heavy and light frequently determines which syllables receive stress In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense—this is the case in Latin Latin or sometimes Roman is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Although often considered a dead language, in view of the fact that it has no native, fluent speakers, Latin continues to be taught in schools and has been, and currently is, used in the process of new word production in modern languages from many and Arabic Arabic (العربية al-ʿarabīyah, ( Arabic pronunciation ) or عربي ʿarabi) is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and the Neo-Aramaic languages. Arabic has more speakers than any other language in the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million, for example. In moraic theory Mora is a unit of sound used in phonology that determines syllable weight (which in turn determines stress or timing) in some languages. As with many technical linguistics terms, the exact definition of mora varies. Perhaps the most succinct working definition was provided by the American linguist James D. McCawley in 1968: a mora is “Something, heavy syllables are said to have two moras, while light syllables are said to have one. Japanese Japanese (日本語?, [nihoŋɡo] ) is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none of them has gained unanimous acceptance. Japanese is an agglutinative is generally described this way.

In English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of, consonants have been analyzed as acting simultaneously as the coda of one syllable and the onset of the following syllable, as in 'bellow' bel-low, a phenomenon known as ambisyllabicity. It is argued that words such as arrow /ˈæroʊ/ can't be divided into separately pronounceable syllables: neither /æ/ nor /ær/ is a possible independent syllable, and likewise with the other short vowels /ɛ ɪ ɒ ʌ/. However, Wells (1990) argues against ambisyllabicity in English, positing that consonants and consonant clusters are codas when after a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, or after a full vowel and followed by a reduced syllable, and are onsets in other contexts. (See English phonology#Phonotactics English phonology is the study of the phonology of the English language. Like all other languages, spoken English has wide variation in its pronunciation both diachronically and synchronically from dialect to dialect. This variation is especially salient in English, because the language is spoken over such a wide territory, being the predominant.)

In traditional Chinese descriptions of tone Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish, the so-called entering tones A checked tone, commonly known by its Chinese calque entering tone is one of four syllable types in the phonology in Middle Chinese which are commonly translated as "tone". However, it is not a tone in the phonetic sense, but rather describes a syllable which ends in a stop consonant, such as p, t, k, or glottal stop. Due to the origin are the tonic possibilities on closed syllables ending in a stop consonant A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. The terms plosive and stop are usually used interchangeably, but they are not perfect synonyms. Plosives are oral stops with a pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. The term is also used to describe oral stops. Many use the term nasal such as /p, t, k/.

A Classical definition

Guilhem Molinier, a member of the Consistori del Gay Saber, which was the first literary academy in the world and held the Floral Games to award the best troubadour A troubadour was a composer and performer of Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages (1100–1350). Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz with the violeta d'aur top prize, gave a definition of the syllable in his Leys d'amor (1328-1337), a book aimed at regulating the then flourishing Occitan Occitan is a Romance language spoken in Occitania, that is, Southern France, the Occitan Valleys of Italy, Monaco and in the Aran Valley of Spain. It is also spoken in the linguistic enclave of Guardia Piemontese . It is a co-official language in Catalonia, Spain (known as Aranese in Aran Valley). Modern Occitan is the closest relative of Catalan poetry:

Sillaba votz es literals. Segon los ditz gramaticals. En un accen pronunciada. Et en un trag: d'una alenada.

A syllable is the sound of several letters, According to grammarians, Pronounced in one accent And uninterruptedly: in one breath.

Syllables and suprasegmentals

The domain of suprasegmental Segments are called "discrete" because they are separate and individual, such as consonants and vowels, and occur in a distinct temporal order. Other units, such as tone, stress, and sometimes secondary articulations such as nasalization, may coexist with multiple segments and cannot be discretely ordered with them. These elements are features is the syllable and not a specific sound, that is to say, they affect all the segments of a syllable:

Sometimes syllable length In linguistics, syllable weight is the concept that syllables pattern together according to the number and/or duration of segments in the rime. In classical poetry, both Greek and Latin, distinctions of syllable weight were fundamental to the meter of the line is also counted as a suprasegmental feature; for example, in some Germanic languages, long vowels may only exist with short consonants and vice versa. However, syllables can be analyzed as compositions of long and short phonemes, as in Finnish and Japanese, where consonant gemination and vowel length are independent.

Syllables and phonotactic constraints

Phonotactic Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters, and vowel sequences by means of phonotactical constraints rules determine which sounds are allowed or disallowed in each part of the syllable. English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of allows very complicated syllables; syllables may begin with up to three consonants (as in string or splash), and occasionally end with as many as four (as in prompts). Many other languages are much more restricted; Japanese Japanese (日本語?, [nihoŋɡo] ) is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none of them has gained unanimous acceptance. Japanese is an agglutinative, for example, only allows /ɴ/ and a chroneme in a coda, and theoretically has no consonant clusters at all, as the onset is composed of at most one consonant.[5]

There are languages that forbid empty onsets, such as Hebrew and Arabic (the names transliterated as "Israel", "Abraham", "Omar", "Ali" and "Abdullah", among many others, actually begin with semiconsonantic glides or with glottal or pharyngeal consonants).

Syllabification

Main article: Syllabification

Syllabification is the separation of a word into syllables, whether spoken or written. In most languages, the actually spoken syllables are the basis of syllabification in writing too. Due to the very weak correspondence between sounds and letters in the spelling of modern English, for example, written syllabification in English has to be based mostly on etymological i.e. morphological instead of phonetic principles. English "written" syllables therefore do not correspond to the actually spoken syllables of the living language.

(Syllabification may also refer to the process of a consonant becoming a syllable nucleus.)

Ambisyllabicity

Many English speakers[who?] have a strong feeling that consonants after stressed short vowels belong with the previous syllable, /ˈCVC.V/, as in competitive /kəm.ˈpɛt.ɨ.tɪv/ and better /ˈbɛt.ər/, and even with consonant clusters, such as banker /ˈbæŋk.ər/ and selfish /ˈCVCC.VC/ versus shellfish /ˈCVC.CVC/. This is at odds with the universal tendency for /CV.CV/ syllabification, and so the concept of ambisyllabicity was developed,[by whom?] with the idea that these consonants are shared between the preceding and following syllables. However, Wells (2002)[1] argues that this is not a useful analysis, and that English syllabification is simply /ˈCVC(C).V/.

Syllables and stress

Syllable structure often interacts with stress. In Latin, for example, stress is regularly determined by syllable weight, a syllable counting as heavy if it has at least one of the following:

In each case the syllable is considered to have two moras.

Syllables and vowel tenseness

In most Germanic languages, lax vowels can only occur in closed syllables. Therefore, these vowels are also called checked vowels, as opposed to the tense vowels that are called free vowels because they can occur in open syllables.

Syllable-less languages

The notion of syllable is challenged by languages that allow long strings of consonants without any intervening vowel or sonorant. Languages of the Northwest coast of North America, including Salishan and Wakashan languages, are famous for this. For instance, these Nuxálk (Bella Coola) words contain only obstruents:

[ɬχʷtɬtsxʷ] 'you spat on me'
[tsʼktskʷtsʼ] 'he arrived'
[xɬpʼχʷɬtɬpɬɬs] 'he had in his possession a bunchberry plant' (Bagemihl 1991:589, 593, 627)
[sxs] 'seal blubber'

In Bagemihl's survey of previous analyses, he finds that the word [tsʼktskʷtsʼ] would have been parsed into 0, 2, 3, 5, or 6 syllables depending which analysis is used. One analysis would consider all vowel and consonants segments as syllable nuclei, another would consider only a small subset as nuclei candidates, and another would simply deny the existence of syllables completely.

This type of phenomenon has also been reported in Berber languages (such as Indlawn Tashlhiyt Berber) and Mon-Khmer languages (such as Semai, Temiar, Kammu). Even in English there are a few utterances that have no vowels; for example, shh (meaning "be quiet") and psst (a sound used to attract attention).

Indlawn Tashlhiyt Berber:

[tftktst tfktstt] 'you sprained it and then gave it'
[rkkm] 'rot' (imperf.) (Dell & Elmedlaoui 1985, 1988)

Semai:

[kckmrʔɛːc] 'short, fat arms' (Sloan 1988)

See also

References

  1. ^ Geoffrey Blainey, A Short History of the World, p.87, citing J.T. Hooker et al., Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet, British Museum, 1993, Ch. 2
  2. ^ See CUNY Conference on the Syllable for discussion of the theoretical existence of the syllable.
  3. ^ It is difficult to apply the concept of 'syllable' to such languages, such as Bella Coola, at all, and it is not clear that any syllables necessarily have nuclei.
  4. ^ But see again Bella Coola.
  5. ^ Shibatani, Masayoshi (1987). "Japanese". in Bernard Comrie. The World's Major Languages. Oxford University Press. pp. 855–80. ISBN 0-19-520521-9.

External links

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive and inappropriate external links or by converting links into footnote references. (November 2009)

Sources and recommended reading

Suprasegmentals
Timing Syllable · Mora · Metrical foot · Vowel reduction
Tone Tone contour · Pitch accent · Register · Downstep · Upstep · Downdrift · Tone terracing · Floating tone · Tone sandhi · Tone letter
Stress Secondary stress · Vowel reduction
Length Chroneme · Gemination · Vowel length · Extra-short
Prosody Intonation (pitch) · Pitch contour · Pitch reset · Stress · Rhythm · Loudness · Prosodic unit

Categories: Phonotactics | Phonology

 

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