Questions tagged [syllables]
A unit of organisation for a sequence of speech sounds. Consists of a nucleus with optional preceding onset and optional following coda.
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How to split IPA spelling into syllables
First, please forgive my ignorance, I'm completely new to linguistics.
Given the IPA spelling for word, is it possible to programmatically split it into its sounds? So, for example, given the word "...
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Why do tone and simple syllable structure appear to be correlated?
I happen to have been struggling to learn a bit of Mandarin Chinese lately, and it's been my first attempt to really deal with tones to any significant extent. I find distinguishing tones quite ...
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How languages compare with the number of different syllables from all words?
Note: I am not a linguist, please provide any corrections for terminology.
I would like to find some approximate data (if it exists) comparing several languages with the number of different syllables ...
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Why do onsets not count for syllable weight in phonological processes?
Whether a syllable has a heavy or light rime is often important in whether it will participate in phonological processes, and whether it will receive stress. For example, in Latin, stress is on the ...
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Are there any languages that only allow CV syllables?
In my research online, I have found a truism that CV is the most basic syllable type cross-linguistically, and is in fact present in all languages. Other syllable types are not present in all ...
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Why do languages have different syllable complexity from each other?
Assuming human vocal tracts are similar and equally capable of articulating different syllable structures, why is it that languages develop different syllable complexity? Why is it that it is not ...
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Correct syllabification in (American) English
I need to figure out what the proper syllabification of words in American English is and why. PLEASE NOTE: I am interested in syllabification from a phonetic point of view, not in terms of hyphenation/...
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Are there any purely monosyllabic languages in use today?
All languages in the world that I know of use words with more than one syllable. Are there any where all words have strictly one syllable? That would mean that there is just one vocal cluster per word,...
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Does the syllable/word ratio in a language determine the number of vowel phonemes it has?
I've recently stumbled on this site dedicated to teaching English as a second language to Portuguese speakers. Right at the beginning, while making a comparison among English and Portuguese ...
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Why isn't intervocalic /ŋ/ analyzed as an onset in English?
I think that sɪ.ŋɪŋ does not seem too unreasonable as a syllabification of the word singing, so I'm a bit puzzled why that option for the syllabification of intervocalic /ŋ/ seems to be dismissed in ...
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What exactly is the definition of a syllable?
I do not consider myself a linguist. I just teach English to Japanese audience. So please excuse my ignorance if this is too basic a question.
What exactly is the definition of a syllable? What I ...
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Do any languages have different syllable weight criteria for primary and secondary stress?
Some languages count the same syllable as "light" or "heavy" depending on the phonological process in question. For example, in Lhasa Tibetan, a CVC syllable ending in a sonorant is heavy for tone ...
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Dictionary of atypical syllabication
I am a literacy researcher looking to create an add on package in R that offers quantitative methods for discourse analysis. I am creating a function for taking a chunk of text and measuring the ...
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Can we conclude that morpheme is ALWAYS greater than syllable?
A morpheme is the most smallest meaningful unit of language. A syllable is the smallest piece of pronunciation that has a vowel in it. Definitions are taken from this link.
I don't know why, but can ...
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How many different distinctive sounds can an average human make? [closed]
If we wanted to create an all new alphabet composed of as much letters as possible, with each letter corresponding to one distinctive sound. What's the maximum amount of letters we could have?
Oh and ...
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Does the analysis of syllables via mora imply that syllable duration is quantized?
From the wikipedia article:
"The definition of a mora varies. In 1968, American linguist James D.
McCawley defined it as "something of which a long syllable consists of
two and a short syllable ...
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Can a syllable be open before a lenghtened consonant?
This thread (related to this problem) can be split into two questions, the first one being restricted to Ancient Greek, the second one being more general.
(1) Let's be, by example, two syllables, the ...
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Are there languages that disallow initial vowels and lack glottal stop?
Which, if any, of the world's languages have both the following features?
Syllable-initial vowels are disallowed; all syllables must begin with a consonant.
There is no glottal stop phoneme.
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The difference between a regular consonant and a syllabic consonant
Trying to understand the difference between regular consonants and Syllabic Consonants. Two examples are from Danish.
[ð̩] skinnede
[l̩] solen
To start (for some context), the way I would naturally ...
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Can a syllabic consonant exist between two vowels?
I think it would break the sonority principle, but. Who knows...
I was thinking on a similar thing to semivowels, it seems they are only possible between vowels, if there is one between two consonants,...
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Is there a "maximal coda principle"?
The "maximal onset principle" says that, in many (most) languages, consonants will attach to a syllable onset rather than a coda when given the choice. For example, "walking" /wakɪŋ/ in English is ...
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Is syllable a phonetic or a phonological concept?
Is syllable a phonetic or a phonological concept? Consider 'syllable counting' as a task: would that be regarded as a phonetic task or phonological tasks? Would it depend on whether words are ...
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Cross-linguistically, how do syllabic consonants interact with morae?
I've read a bit about the moraic system found in Japanese, but as there isn't much complexity in the case of its syllabic consonants, I am left with a few questions.
1) Are there any natural ...
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Mandarin Chinese syllable and tone frequency (not character frequency)
There's plenty of good resources on Chinese character frequency available.
But I'm wondering about syllable frequency independent of characters, and also tone frequency both separate and in ...
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Why aren't the number of syllables in constructed languages like Esperanto minimized?
It would seem advantageous for any language to have minimal numbers of syllables in its words, especially for its most common words, where there would be no loss (and instead, probable gain) in ...
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Can languages restrict their number of distinct syllables when written by syllabaries?
Disclaimer: I am not a linguist, please provide any corrections for terminology.
From How languages compare with the number of different syllables from all words?, Yoon Mi Oh's thesis counted the ...
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liquids and nasals as syllable nuclei!
I have just started studying Phonology and I find a problem while dealing with Syllables. I read that nuclei are not only vowels, but they could be also liquids (l - r) or nasals (n - m - ng).
But ...
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Is Swahili a Mora-counting language like Japanese?
I have this simple question on Kiswahili, a Bantu language.
As you know in english, we can not always define morae. it's completely different from Japanese morae system.
But when I learn Swahili, ...
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Are the unreleased stops in cantonese discernable by listening?
Background-Info:
In contrast to mandarin Chinese, which can only have a few consonants at the and of a syllable, e.g. man, mang, Cantonese syllables can contain p,t,k at their end.
Nevertheless, ...
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Is there a computational method to syllabify English words?
There are straightforward ways to convert English words to phonemes via a dictionary that contains such information. However, is there a way to automatically convert English text into syllables? I.e., ...
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Components that comprise a syllable
Is there a standard representation that combines onset, nucleus, coda with mora? That would help me visualize the prosodic hierarchy better, because I could put something beneath the syllable level.
...
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Is there a phonotactics hierarchy?
For example, Japanese is (C)V(N) [plus that geminated stops across syllable boundaries thing], while Mandarin is (C)(G)(V)(G)(/n/ or /ŋ/) and Polynesian languages are just (C)V. Is there a gradation ...
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What is the syllable structure of a word with an affricate in the onset?
If a word has an affricate in the onset, let's say /ts/, along with another consonant, let's say /k/, to make a word like /tski/, is the phonotactic syllable structure of this word CCV or is it CCCV?
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Does pre-fortis clipping only operate within a syllable? If not, what is its actual scope?
English is known to have a phenomenon of "pre-fortis clipping": in certain contexts, vowel and sonorant phonemes before a fortis/voiceless consonant are realized with shorter duration than the same ...
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How do you bound a syllable / split a word into syllables programmatically?
What are the rules for bounding a syllable? I am trying to take IPA text and write software to automatically separate the syllables for the word. By trying I am still just thinking about how to do it. ...
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Are the nasal portions of prenasalized consonants syllabic?
Prenasalized consonants occur in a number of natural languages. https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Prenasalized_consonant
When I hear someone pronounce a word that begins with a prenasalized consonant, ...
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English onsets with /s/ and sonority hierarchy
Why are clusters such as /sk/ (as in sky), /st/ (stop), and /sp/ (spill) allowed as onsets in English? The sonority decreases in these clusters and does that not violate the phonotactic rules?
On a ...
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Is syllable boundary properly annotated at the phonetic or phonological level?
Should syllable boundary be indicated in the phonetic and/or phoneme transcription?
/dog.gi/ [dog.gi] 'doggy'
/doggi/ [dog.gi] 'doggy'
Or does the choice of one of the two strategies have certain ...
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Word and/or syllable frequency data for Lao
I've returned my language focus to Lao now that my travels through Asia have finished and I'm back home. There are not as many or as high quality resources available for Lao as for many other ...
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What is the explanatory value of moras: why do we need syllable weight?
I understand that morae are used to determine stress and timing in some languages, so obviously there's some motivation to posit their existence in the syllable. But I am not sure I understand what ...
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Why is recognition based on phonemes and not syllables or morphemes?
Why is recognition based on detecting individual phonemes, and not chunks such as morphemes or syllables?..
My question were in relation to human perception, and the existence of phonetic boundary, ...
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"split into" -- putting the stress on the right syllable
I heard a non-native speaker of English saying something would be "split into".
After a fraction of a second I realized that what was intended was "split in two".
The difference appears to be that ...
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Can R sound follow a schwa in a syllable?
Let me ask a question of an usage of schwa as a phoneme and [r]. This [r] is the sound which is used in English and generally expressed with R and not [r] expressed with IPA.
Schwa can be regarded ...
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What is X in a syllable C=consonant, V=vowel
I don't under stand (X) and (s/sh) in this sentence.
As opposed to Hebrew CV(X)(C), the non-Semitic syllable structure of Israeli, (s/sh)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(s/sh)
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Is a long consonant counted as C or CC in syllable structure?
There are languages that have consonants that are a bit longer in duration i.e. the same as long vowels (e.g. like /iː/). So a long consonant is represented by writing /ː/ after it: long L = /lː/, ...
user30668
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What are the arguments against Wells’s syllabification of English?
In Syllabification and Allophony John Wells argues for a view of English syllabification based on phonetic processes within the pronunciation of words. He mentions elsewhere that it is unorthodox, but ...
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Does 'z' act as a coda or onset in the syllable structure for the word crazy?
I am working on drawing the syllable structure for the word crazy. So far within kreizi, ei and i are nucliet, kr is an onset, but I am stuck on the 'z'. There are many words that start with z in the ...
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Violations of sonority sequencing principle in English
What accounts for these violations of the sonority sequencing principle in English: /strɛŋkθ/, /fʌdʒ/ （both have fricatives after stops in the coda)
Wikipedia says
In native English words, no phoneme ...
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Is there distinct jargon for syllabaries depending on their inventory?
The dictionary definition of a syllabary is "a set of written characters representing syllables and (in some languages or stages of writing) serving the purpose of an alphabet." I would personally ...
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Is there re-syllabification in Chinese?
I'm reading prosodic phonology, and wondering if there is any re-syllabification process happening in Mandarin Chinese?
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