Syllable

A Greek sigma, ⟨σ⟩, is used as a wild card for 'syllable', and a dollar/peso sign, ⟨$⟩, marks a syllable boundary where the usual fullstop might be misunderstood.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.In the syllable structure of Sinitic languages, the onset is replaced with an initial, and a semivowel or liquid forms another segment, called the medial.These four segments are grouped into two slightly different components:[example needed] In many languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, such as Chinese, the syllable structure is expanded to include an additional, optional medial segment located between the onset (often termed the initial in this context) and the rime.The hierarchical model accounts for the role that the nucleus+coda constituent plays in verse (i.e., rhyming words such as cat and bat are formed by matching both the nucleus and coda, or the entire rime), and for the distinction between heavy and light syllables, which plays a role in phonological processes such as, for example, sound change in Old English scipu and wordu, where in a process called high vowel deletion (HVD), the nominative/accusative plural of single light-syllable roots (like "*scip-") got a "u" ending in OE, whereas heavy syllable roots (like "*word-") would not, giving "scip-u" but "word-∅".[10][11][12] In some traditional descriptions of certain languages such as Cree and Ojibwe, the syllable is considered left-branching, i.e. onset and nucleus group below a higher-level unit, called a "body" or "core".The difference between heavy and light frequently determines which syllables receive stress – this is the case in Latin and Arabic, for example.[15] The linking of a word-final consonant to a vowel beginning the word immediately following it forms a regular part of the phonetics of some languages, including Spanish, Hungarian, and Turkish.Thus, in Spanish, the phrase los hombres ('the men') is pronounced [loˈsom.bɾes], Hungarian az ember ('the human') as [ɒˈzɛm.bɛr], and Turkish nefret ettim ('I hated it') as [nefˈɾe.tet.tim].However, an alternative that has received some support is to treat an intervocalic consonant as ambisyllabic, i.e. belonging both to the preceding and to the following syllable: /hʌṛi/.This is less strange than it may appear at first, as most such languages allow syllables to begin with a phonemic glottal stop (the sound in the middle of English uh-oh or, in some dialects, the double T in button, represented in the IPA as /ʔ/).Ashkenazi and Sephardi Hebrew may commonly ignore א, ה and ע, and Arabic forbid empty onsets.The names Israel, Abel, Abraham, Omar, Abdullah, and Iraq appear not to have onsets in the first syllable, but in the original Hebrew and Arabic forms they actually begin with various consonants: the semivowel /j/ in יִשְׂרָאֵל yisra'él, the glottal fricative in /h/ הֶבֶל heḇel, the glottal stop /ʔ/ in אַבְרָהָם 'aḇrāhām, or the pharyngeal fricative /ʕ/ in عُمَر ʿumar, عَبْدُ ٱللّٰ ʿabdu llāh, and عِرَاق ʿirāq.Conversely, the Arrernte language of central Australia may prohibit onsets altogether; if so, all syllables have the underlying shape VC(C).For example, many Romance languages such as Spanish never insert such a glottal stop, while English does so only some of the time, depending on factors such as conversation speed; in both cases, this suggests that the words in question are truly vowel-initial.In other words, while the glottal stop is predictable in German (inserted only if a stressed syllable would otherwise begin with a vowel),[18] the same sound is a regular consonantal phoneme in Arabic.The status of this consonant in the respective writing systems corresponds to this difference: there is no reflex of the glottal stop in German orthography, but there is a letter in the Arabic alphabet (Hamza (ء)).For example, in some languages written in the Latin alphabet, an initial glottal stop is left unwritten (see the German example); on the other hand, some languages written using non-Latin alphabets such as abjads and abugidas have a special zero consonant to represent a null onset.As an example, in Hangul, the alphabet of the Korean language, a null onset is represented with ㅇ at the left or top section of a grapheme, as in 역 "station", pronounced yeok, where the diphthong yeo is the nucleus and k is the coda.The syllable nucleus is usually a vowel, in the form of a monophthong, diphthong, or triphthong, but sometimes is a syllabic consonant.The notion of syllable is challenged by languages that allow long strings of obstruents without any intervening vowel or sonorant.By far the most common syllabic consonants are sonorants like [l], [r], [m], [n] or [ŋ], as in English bottle, church (in rhotic accents), rhythm, button and lock 'n key.However, English allows syllabic obstruents in a few para-verbal onomatopoeic utterances such as shh (used to command silence) and psst (used to attract attention).Mandarin Chinese is famous for having such sounds in at least some of its dialects, for example the pinyin syllables sī shī rī, usually pronounced [sź̩ ʂʐ̩́ ʐʐ̩́], respectively.Other examples: In Bagemihl's survey of previous analyses, he finds that the Bella Coola word /t͡sʼktskʷt͡sʼ/ 'he arrived' would have been parsed into 0, 2, 3, 5, or 6 syllables depending on which analysis is used.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.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 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 then-flourishing Occitan poetry: Sillaba votz es literals.