ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 51: Concepts: The Syllable The syllable is a standard unit

ayearinlanguage:

A Year in Language, Day 51: Concepts: The Syllable

The syllable is a standard unit of prosody, the area of linguistics devoted to rhythm, tone, and other more musical qualities of language. While an element of culture for millennia, it has not always been recognized as a salient unit for linguistic study. It achieves this status through evidence that the grammars of languages can and do recognize syllable boundaries as places for phonological or syntactic processes.

Syllables are made of three basic parts: the onset, the nucleus, and the coda. The onset and coda are the consonant(s) that come at the beginning and end of a syllable, respectively. The nucleus is, of course, the core focus of the syllable and is normally, though not always, a vowel. The exact rules about what kinds of sounds can go where in a syllable are called “phonotactics”. For example, English phonotactics state that the English syllable is structured ©3V©5. This looks frighteningly like math but all it says is that the English syllable can have between 0 and 3 consonants clustered in an onset and between 0 and 5 in a coda. The V simply represents the vowel. Japanese, on the other hand, has phonotactics like ©(j)V(n). This says that Japanese syllables can have only one consonant in the onset, with an exception for double consonants if the second one is /j/ (English “y”). It can only have /n/ for a coda.

The syllable is not the only unit of its kind in linguistics, and people who have studied poetry may already be familiar with the concept of a mora. A mora is similar to a syllable but takes “weight” into account. Not all languages define “weight” the same, but generally speaking light syllables aka one mora has at most one onset consonant and a nucleus; ©V. A heavy syllable, with two moras, has a coda or a long vowel; ©VC/©VV. Japanese and Latin both use(d) moraic theory, in fact Haikus are technically not three lines of 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables respectively, but of that many moras.