My third lee-mail, now available outside of Wave.
My initial email was too long. BUT WHATEVER.
I'll google those fancy words tomorrow and hope that it PROVES ME 100% CORRECT. :3
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Hi Dr Kim,
I found you via a google of 'Manchester phonology'. Top result --
clearly the best. Your staff profile and CV on your personal page make
you seem like a relevant person to send this email to, but if you're
too busy or hate this email, then feel free to pass me onto the
lowliest master's student you can find. I'm sure they can answer my
rather basic question.
Basically I've managed to convince myself that English words such as
"James" or "Grasp" are actually disyllabic rather than monosyllabic. I
cannot make myself say it aloud as a single syllable anymore whilst
thinking about it, or even _hear_ it as a single syllable. All the
friends I've spoken to about this contest me on the issue and say it's
a single syllable, and I want to know which of us is wrong, if any.
Can you help, please? :)
My major problem is where the puff of air for the end plosive comes
from. Is this not just a very short, second syllable that is by
convention ignored? If it were using the air from the first syllable,
why is it not an 'unreleased stop'? I can't see how James is /ˈdʒeɪms/
rather than /ˈdʒeɪm su/. What am I missing? What is wrong with me?!?
Another interesting situation is making James possessive, e.g. James',
which is: /ˈdʒeɪm sɪz/. (or is it /ˈdʒeɪms sɪz/ ?). Isn't this always
two syllables? And to me the second syllable always starts with the
/s/. Note: I'm not too hot on the use of IPA, so my vowels are
probably completely wrong :)
This all kind of came about after I started to learn Korean. They like
to butcher up English loanwords by sticking in a 으 (/ɯ/) sound
everywhere to round off the end constants. Is the mysterious 'second
syllable' I've convinced myself of simply a cultural thing? That most
East Asian languages are used to suppressing the last consonant when
there's no vowel present, so they have to 'undo' that behaviour by
explicitly forcing out a larger vowel sound? Whereas to an English
speaker it's a very natural suppression/unstressing of the last vowel,
and somehow I've picked up on this and it's driving me mad?
I've tried looking for information on this subject online, but I'm not
sure what I'm after or where to look. And then it just leads down the
avenue of too-much-information, as I find myself reading about every
aspect of linguistics, none of which I have a clue about. Infact
everything in this email is nothing short of wikipedia-warrioring, so
I wouldn't be too surprised if you thought all of the above was
deluded ramblings.
Any information you can give me, even if it's just "shut up you're
wrong it's one syllable", is better than none!
Thanks for your time,
Lee
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Hi Lee,
You've actually hit on an interesting issue, which is that while there are some universal physical constraints as to what groups of consonants and vowels can "stick together" to form a syllable, languages differ with respect to what kinds of syllable structure they allow, as well as what sounds are allowed to occupy certain positions in the syllable. Korean and Japanese, for instance, don't allow the kinds of consonant clusters that English does, and so they alter English words in systematic ways to conform to structures permitted by the native phonology.
English is unusual among the world's languages in that it allows "s" in combination with other consonants at the edges of a syllable. You'll find more information about why this is strange if you search for information on the "sonority scale" and the Sonority Sequencing Generalization. There are even languages like Swedish that stick a small "y" like sound onto the end of a syllable while still having it be the same syllable. Generally, you can investigate the true number of syllables by looking at other phonological rules in the language that explicitly refer to number of syllables (e.g. algorithms for stress placement). Still, for many cases of English "s" it has been argued that while the words do not have two syllables, they have more than one - more like one and a half. A keyword search for this would be "syllable appendices" or possibly "sesquisyllables."
Hope this helps.
Best wishes,
Yuni
