A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word. In phonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" of words. A syllable usually consists of a nucleus (most often a vowel), which may be preceded by an onset and followed by a coda (collectively margins, which are most often consonants). Syllables may bear properties such as stress and tone and be subject to operations such as reduplication. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite. Most languages of the world use relatively simple syllable structures that often alternate between vowels and consonants.
Despite being present in virtually all human languages, syllables still have no precise definition that is valid for all known languages. A common criterion for finding syllable boundaries is native-speaker intuition, but individuals sometimes disagree on them.
The earliest attested instances of syllabic writing are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur, which predate the earliest instances of alphabetic writing by several centuries. The shift from pictographic writing to syllabic writing has been called "the most important advance in the history of writing".
A word that consists of a single syllable (like English dog) is called a monosyllable (and is said to be monosyllabic). Similar terms include disyllable (and disyllabic; also bisyllable and bisyllabic) for a word of two syllables; trisyllable (and trisyllabic) for a word of three syllables; and polysyllable (and polysyllabic), which may refer to any word of more than one syllable.
Etymology
Syllable is an Anglo-Norman variation of Old French , from Latin , from Koine Greek (). means "the taken together", referring to letters that are taken together to make a single sound.
is a verbal noun from the verb , a compound of the preposition "with" and the verb "take". The noun uses the root , which appears in the aorist tense; the present tense stem is formed by adding a nasal infix before the and a suffix at the end.
Transcription In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the full stop marks syllable breaks, as in the word "astronomical" .
In practice, however, IPA transcription is typically divided into words by spaces, and often these spaces are also understood to be syllable breaks. In addition, the stress mark is placed immediately before a stressed syllable, and when the stressed syllable is in the middle of a word, in practice, the stress mark also marks a syllable break, for example in the word "understood" (though the syllable boundary may still be explicitly marked with a full stop, e.g. ).
When a word space comes in the middle of a syllable (that is, when a syllable spans words), a tie bar can be used for liaison, as in the French combination . The liaison tie is also used to join lexical words into phonological words, for example hot dog .
A Greek sigma, , is used as a wild card for 'syllable', and a dollar/peso sign, , marks a syllable boundary where the usual fullstop might be misunderstood. For example, is a pair of syllables, and is a syllable-final vowel.
Components
Onset–nucleus–rime segmentation In this framework, the general structure of a syllable (σ) consists of three segments grouped into two components:
Onset (ω): A consonant or consonant cluster, obligatory in some languages, optional or even restricted in others Rime (ρ): Right branch, contrasts with onset, splits into nucleus and coda Nucleus (ν): A vowel or syllabic consonant, obligatory in most languages Coda (κ): A consonant or consonant cluster, optional in some languages, highly restricted or prohibited in others
The syllable is usually considered right-branching, i.e. nucleus and coda are grouped together as a "rime" and are only distinguished at the second level.
The sounds occupying these positions may also be denoted with the following notation: Consonant (C, or, for a consonant from a idiosyncratic set of possibilities, X) Obstruent (T) Nasal consonant (N) Liquid consonant (L) Glide (G, or, less often, H) Vowel (V) Tone (T, or, if there is a risk of confusion with an obstruent, ) an exact phoneme or even phone (any specific IPA symbol) possibly with the following notation to indicate occurrence count: "Exactly one" (no exponent) "Zero or one" (surrounding parentheses or, more rarely, ? after the letter) "Zero or more" (* after the letter) "One or more" (+ after the letter)
The nucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable. The onset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and the coda (literally 'tail') is the sound or sounds that follow the nucleus. They are sometimes collectively known as the shell. 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. Languages vary greatly in the restrictions on the sounds making up the onset, nucleus and coda of a syllable, according to what is termed a language's phonotactics.
Although every syllable has supra-segmental features, these are usually ignored if not semantically relevant, e.g. in tonal languages.
Chinese segmentation
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:
Initial : Optional onset, excluding semivowels Final : Medial, nucleus, and final consonant grouped togetherMore generally, the letter φ indicates a prosodic foot of two syllables Medial : Optional semivowel or liquidMore generally, the letter μ indicates a mora Nucleus : A vowel or syllabic consonant Coda : Optional final consonant Tone : May be carried by the syllable as a whole or by the rime
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 medial is normally a semivowel, but reconstructions of Old Chinese generally include liquid medials ( in modern reconstructions, in older versions), and many reconstructions of Middle Chinese include a medial contrast between and , where the functions phonologically as a glide rather than as part of the nucleus. In addition, many reconstructions of both Old and Middle Chinese include complex medials such as , , and . The medial groups phonologically with the rime rather than the onset, and the combination of medial and rime is collectively known as the final.
Some linguists, especially when discussing the modern Chinese varieties, use the terms "final" and "rime" interchangeably. In historical Chinese phonology, however, the distinction between "final" (including the medial) and "rime" (not including the medial) is important in understanding the rime dictionaries and rime tables that form the primary sources for Middle Chinese, and as a result most authors distinguish the two according to the above definition.
Grouping of components
In some theories of phonology, syllable structures are displayed as tree diagrams (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.For discussion of the theoretical existence of the syllable see
There are many arguments for a hierarchical relationship, rather than a linear one, between the syllable constituents. One hierarchical model groups the syllable nucleus and coda into an intermediate level, 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 and , 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-∅".
Body
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". This contrasts with the coda.
Rime
The rime or rhyme of a syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda. It is the part of the syllable used in most poetic rhymes, and the part that is lengthened or stressed when a person elongates or stresses a word in speech.
The rime is usually the portion of a syllable from the first vowel to the end. For example, is the rime of all of the words at, sat, and flat. However, the nucleus does not necessarily need to be a vowel in some languages, such as English. For instance, the rime of the second syllables of the words bottle and fiddle is just , a liquid consonant.
Just as the rime branches into the nucleus and coda, the nucleus and coda may each branch into multiple phonemes. The limit for the number of phonemes which may be contained in each varies by language. For example, Japanese and most Sino-Tibetan languages do not have consonant clusters at the beginning or end of syllables, whereas many Eastern European languages can have more than two consonants at the beginning or end of the syllable. In English, the onset may have up to three consonants, and the coda four.
Rime and rhyme are variants of the same word, but the rarer form rime is sometimes used to mean specifically syllable rime to differentiate it from the concept of poetic rhyme. This distinction is not made by some linguists and does not appear in most dictionaries.
+ Examples C = consonant, V = vowel, optional components are in parentheses. structure: syllable = onset + rhyme C+V+C*: C1(C2)V1(V2)(C3)(C4) = C1(C2) + V1(V2)(C3)(C4) V+C*: V1(V2)(C3)(C4) = ∅ + V1(V2)(C3)(C4)
Weight
A heavy syllable is generally one with a branching rime, i.e. it is either a closed syllable that ends in a consonant, or a syllable with a branching nucleus, i.e. a long vowel or diphthong. The name 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 are considered heavy, while both VC and V syllables are light. Some languages distinguish a third type of superheavy syllable, which consists of VVC syllables (with both a branching nucleus and rime) or VCC syllables (with a coda consisting of two or more consonants) or both.
In moraic theory, heavy syllables are said to have two moras, while light syllables are said to have one and superheavy syllables are said to have three. Japanese phonology is generally described this way.
Many languages forbid superheavy syllables, while a significant number forbid any heavy syllable. Some languages strive for constant syllable weight; for example, in stressed, non-final syllables in Italian, short vowels co-occur with closed syllables while long vowels co-occur with open syllables, so that all such syllables are heavy (not light or superheavy).