Буын: Сөз дыбыстарының ұйымдастыру бірлігі

Unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds, typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. 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. Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur. This shift from pictograms to syllables 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 either to a word of more than three syllables or to any word of more than one syllable.

Syllable is an Anglo Norman variation of Old French sillabe, from Latin syllaba, from Koine Greek συλλαβή syllabḗ συλλαβή means "the taken together", referring to letters that are taken together to make a single sound. συλλαβή is a verbal noun from the verb συλλαμβάνω syllambánō, a compound of the preposition σύν sýn "with" and the verb λαμβάνω lambánō "take". The noun uses the root λαβ , which appears in the aorist tense; the present tense stem λαμβάν is formed by adding a nasal infix before the β b and a suffix αν an at the end.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the fullstop 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 les amis 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.

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. 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 scipu and wordu, 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 ∅".

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.

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 five: strengths can be pronounced as /s//t//ɹ//E//N//k//T//s/, while angsts /æ//N//k//s//t//s/ can have five coda consonants. 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)

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). The difference between heavy and light frequently determines which syllables receive stress – this is the case in Latin and Arabic, for example. The system of poetic meter in many classical languages, such as Classical Greek, Classical Latin, Old Tamil and Sanskrit, is based on syllable weight rather than stress (so called quantitative rhythm or quantitative meter).

Syllabification is the separation of a word into syllables, whether spoken or written. In most languages, the actually spoken syllables are the basis of syllabification in writing too. Due to the very weak correspondence between sounds and letters in the spelling of modern English, for example, written syllabification in English has to be based mostly on etymological i. e. morphological instead of phonetic principles. English written syllables therefore do not correspond to the actually spoken syllables of the living language. Phonotactic rules determine which sounds are allowed or disallowed in each part of the syllable. English allows very complicated syllables; syllables may begin with up to three consonants (as in strength), and occasionally end with as many as five (as in angsts, pronounced [æŋsts]). (Some dialects of English pronounce strengths with a four consonant onset, and angsts with a five consonant coda: [stʃɹɛŋkθs] and [æŋksts] respectively.) Many other languages are much more restricted; Japanese, for example, only allows and a chroneme in a coda, and theoretically has no consonant clusters at all, as the onset is composed of at most one consonant. The linking of a word final consonant to a vowel beginning the word immediately following it forms a regular part of the phonetics of some languages, including Spanish, Hungarian, and Turkish. Thus, in Spanish, the phrase los hombres ('the men') is pronounced , Hungarian az ember ('the human') as , and Turkish nefret ettim ('I hated it') as In Italian, a final sound can be moved to the next syllable in enchainement, sometimes with a gemination: e. g., non ne ho mai avuti ('I've never had any of them') is broken into syllables as and io ci vado e lei anche ('I go there and she does as well') is realized as A related phenomenon, called consonant mutation, is found in the Celtic languages like Irish and Welsh, whereby unwritten (but historical) final consonants affect the initial consonant of the following word.

There can be disagreement about the location of some divisions between syllables in spoken language. The problems of dealing with such cases have been most commonly discussed with relation to English. In the case of a word such as hurry, the division may be or , neither of which seems a satisfactory analysis for a non rhotic accent such as RP (British English): results in a syllable final , which is not normally found, while gives a syllable final short stressed vowel, which is also non occurring. Arguments can be made in favour of one solution or the other: A general rule has been proposed that states that "Subject to certain conditions , consonants are syllabified with the more strongly stressed of two flanking syllables", while many other phonologists prefer to divide syllables with the consonant or consonants attached to the following syllable wherever possible. However, an alternative that has received some support is to treat an intervocalic consonant as ambisyllabic, i. e. belonging both to the preceding and to the following syllable: This is discussed in more detail in .

The onset (also known as anlaut) is the consonant sound or sounds at the beginning of a syllable, occurring before the nucleus. Most syllables have an onset. Syllables without an onset may be said to have an empty or zero onset – that is, nothing where the onset would be.

Some languages restrict onsets to be only a single consonant, while others allow multiconsonant onsets according to various rules. For example, in English, onsets such as pr , pl and tr are possible but tl is not, and sk is possible but ks is not. In Greek, however, both ks and tl are possible onsets, while contrarily in Classical Arabic no multiconsonant onsets are allowed at all.

Some languages forbid null onsets. In these languages, words beginning in a vowel, like the English word at, are impossible. This is less strange than it may appear at first, as most such languages allow syllables to begin with a phonemic glottal stop (the sound in the middle of English uh oh or, in some dialects, the double T in button, represented in the IPA as ). In English, a word that begins with a vowel may be pronounced with an epenthetic glottal stop when following a pause, though the glottal stop may not be a phoneme in the language. Few languages make a phonemic distinction between a word beginning with a vowel and a word beginning with a glottal stop followed by a vowel, since the distinction will generally only be audible following another word. However, Maltese and some Polynesian languages do make such a distinction, as in Hawaiian ('fire') and / ← ('tuna') and Maltese ← Arabic and Maltese ← Arabic
Ashkenazi and Sephardi Hebrew may commonly ignore א, ה and ע, and Arabic forbid empty onsets. The names Israel, Abel, Abraham, Omar, Abdullah, and Iraq appear not to have onsets in the first syllable, but in the original Hebrew and Arabic forms they actually begin with various consonants: the semivowel in יִשְׂרָאֵל yisra'él, the glottal fricative in הֶבֶל heḇel, the glottal stop in אַבְרָהָם 'aḇrāhām, or the pharyngeal fricative in عُمَر ʿumar, عَبْدُ ٱللّٰ ʿabdu llāh, and لْعِرَاق ʿirāq. Conversely, the Arrernte language of central Australia may prohibit onsets altogether; if so, all syllables have the underlying shape VC(C). The difference between a syllable with a null onset and one beginning with a glottal stop is often purely a difference of phonological analysis, rather than the actual pronunciation of the syllable. In some cases, the pronunciation of a (putatively) vowel initial word when following another word – particularly, whether or not a glottal stop is inserted – indicates whether the word should be considered to have a null onset. For example, many Romance languages such as Spanish never insert such a glottal stop, while English does so only some of the time, depending on factors such as conversation speed; in both cases, this suggests that the words in question are truly vowel initial. But there are exceptions here, too. For example, standard German (excluding many southern accents) and Arabic both require that a glottal stop be inserted between a word and a following, putatively vowel initial word. Yet such words are perceived to begin with a vowel in German but a glottal stop in Arabic. The reason for this has to do with other properties of the two languages. For example, a glottal stop does not occur in other situations in German, e. g. before a consonant or at the end of word. On the other hand, in Arabic, not only does a glottal stop occur in such situations (e. g. Classical "he asked", "opinion", "light"), but it occurs in alternations that are clearly indicative of its phonemic status (cf. Classical "writer" vs. /mak "written", "eater" vs. "eaten"). In other words, while the glottal stop is predictable in German (inserted only if a stressed syllable would otherwise begin with a vowel), the same sound is a regular consonantal phoneme in Arabic. The status of this consonant in the respective writing systems corresponds to this difference: there is no reflex of the glottal stop in German orthography, but there is a letter in the Arabic alphabet (Hamza (ء)). The writing system of a language may not correspond with the phonological analysis of the language in terms of its handling of (potentially) null onsets. For example, in some languages written in the Latin alphabet, an initial glottal stop is left unwritten (see the German example); on the other hand, some languages written using non Latin alphabets such as abjads and abugidas have a special zero consonant to represent a null onset. As an example, in Hangul, the alphabet of the Korean language, a null onset is represented with ㅇ at the left or top section of a grapheme, as in 역 "station", pronounced yeok, where the diphthong yeo is the nucleus and k is the coda.

The coda (also known as auslaut) comprises the consonant sounds of a syllable that follow the nucleus. The sequence of nucleus and coda is called a rime. Some syllables consist of only a nucleus, only an onset and a nucleus with no coda, or only a nucleus and coda with no onset. The phonotactics of many languages forbid syllable codas. Examples are Swahili and Hawaiian. In others, codas are restricted to a small subset of the consonants that appear in onset position. At a phonemic level in Japanese, for example, a coda may only be a nasal (homorganic with any following consonant) or, in the middle of a word, gemination of the following consonant. (On a phonetic level, other codas occur due to elision of /i/ and /u/.) In other languages, nearly any consonant allowed as an onset is also allowed in the coda, even clusters of consonants. In English, for example, all onset consonants except are allowed as syllable codas. If the coda consists of a consonant cluster, the sonority typically decreases from first to last, as in the English word help. This is called the sonority hierarchy (or sonority scale). English onset and coda clusters are therefore different. The onset in strengths does not appear as a coda in any English word. However, some clusters do occur as both onsets and codas, such as in stardust. The sonority hierarchy is more strict in some languages and less strict in others.

Some languages, such as Hawaiian, forbid codas, so that all syllables are open.

In most languages, the pitch or pitch contour in which a syllable is pronounced conveys shades of meaning such as emphasis or surprise, or distinguishes a statement from a question. In tonal languages, however, the pitch affects the basic lexical meaning (e. g. "cat" vs. "dog") or grammatical meaning (e. g. past vs. present). In some languages, only the pitch itself (e. g. high vs. low) has this effect, while in others, especially East Asian languages such as Chinese, Thai or Vietnamese, the shape or contour (e. g. level vs. rising vs. falling) also needs to be distinguished.