Was "Dip-thong" but now I'm hijacking it!

[Aaron E. Drews]

on 19/5/00 5:54 PM, Derrick Chapman wrote:

> "The (pronunciation) syllable division is before the -th-, but the etymology
> has di- + phthong 'sound'.  IRudy"
>
> You know, ever since I had trouble dividing words into syllables in the
> first grade, I've been aware of the fact that the dictionary is very often
> wrong.  Maybe the whole premise of syllable division of words is flawed.
>
> The teachers gave me a rule:  divide words between double consonants.  Fine,
> how about "little:"  Do you say LIT-TUHL, LI-TUHL or LIT-UHL?  The truth is
> there's a great deal of variation, depending on dialect and situation.
>

I would disagree.  Trying to divide spoken syllables based on spelling - or
even some dictionary listings - is flawed.  But syllable division in the
spoken language, however, is very real and very regular across dialects and
languages.

In multi-syllabic words, consonants tend to associate themselves with the
vowel to the right - even if the following vowel belongs to another word:
e.g _key pout_ and _keep out_ would be pronounced the same.  Vowels like
lots of consonants to their left and as few consonants as possible to their
right.

If there are a lot of consonants in the middle of a word, the second (and
subsequent) vowels try to grab as many of the consonants to their left, with
a certain constraint.  That constraint is that the medial vowel can grab
only as many consonants as can be found at the beginnings of words.  Take
the word "helpful":

If vowels had it entirely their way, it would be
    he - lpful

So, the second syllable sheds the 'l' because "lpf" isn't found at the
beginning of any word of English.  This leaves:
    hel-pful

This would be perfectly fine in German, because you can get words that begin
with "pf", but not in English.  So, we end up with:
    help-ful

"phth" is never found at the beginning of a word in English, so the "ph" go
to the vowel on its left.  Why "phth" become "pth" is something else.

"Little" would, in normal, regular speech, be "lit-tle".  The sound that you
get for the "tt" in American English (which sounds nothing like the "t"
found at the beginning of words, if you listen closely) can only happen if
it is part of two syllables.  In normal speech, the "tt" would be part of
both syllables.  If you exaggerate each syllable of "little", isolating
them, then chances are you would say "li-ttle" because the first vowel
doesn't want any consonants to its right and the second 'vowel' is grabbing
it (what the vowel is brings us to a different topic).

Then again, first-grade teaches don't tend to be linguistics grad students
trying to prove the importance of syllable structure in dialectal
differences.

Cheers,
Aaron




________________________________________________________________________
Aaron E. Drews                               The University of Edinburgh
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron      Departments of English Language and
aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk                    Theoretical & Applied Linguistics

 "MERE ACCUMULATION OF OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE IS NOT PROOF"
  --Death