Syllabic consonants

[Geoffrey Nathan]

I will break my vow here not to enter into discussions with Mr. Z, but his comment

>Syllabic "l" is not a good concept. A syllable needs a vowel.
> Also if you add a suffix you might need that vowel.
>For instand cannibalize. It's not pronounced cannablize.
> But a "syllabic l" would wipe out the vowel that is necessary
> there. Syllabic l is bad concept that is worthless.

is insulting to Czech speakers living in Brno (syllabic trilled rhotic) and those who speak Srpski (Serbian), not to mention those who live in Plzen (syllabic lateral approximant) or drink the 'Plsner' that comes from there.  Not to mention all American English speakers who have syllabic [n]'s in 'button' [bV?n,] (V=caret; ,=syllabic marker under n).  Then there's Tamazight Berber with syllabic f's and even t's:         /tf`tk`ts`tt/   `you sprained it' (http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~jcoleman/TPS.html).
And, of course, there is a contrast between syllabic [l,] and non-syllabic [l] in cases such as the famous pair 'coddling' (treating with kid gloves) and 'codling' (baby cod).  M-W, for example, illustrates this contrast (and no, I'm not making a substantive claim about the phonemes of English here--I suspect there's actually an underlying schwa there, but as with all sonorants, the coda spreads into the nucleus in unstressed syllables.)

Geoff



Geoffrey S. Nathan
Faculty Liaison, C&IT
and Associate Professor, Linguistics Program
+1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT)
+1 (313) 577-8621 (English/Linguistics)

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