A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word. In phonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" of words. A syllable usually consists of a nucleus (most often a vowel), which may be preceded by an onset and followed by a coda (collectively margins, which are most often consonants). Syllables may bear properties such as stress and tone and be subject to operations such as reduplication. 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. Most languages of the world use relatively simple syllable structures that often alternate between vowels and consonants. Despite being present in virtually all human languages, syllables still have no precise definition that is valid for all known languages. A common criterion for finding syllable boundaries is native-speaker intuition, but individuals sometimes disagree on them. The earliest attested instances of syllabic writing are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur, which predate the earliest instances of alphabetic writing by several centuries. The shift from pictographic writing to syllabic writing 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 to any word of more than one syllable.
Etymology
Syllable is an Anglo-Norman variation of Old French sillabe, from Latin syllaba, from Koine Greek συλλαβή syllabḗ (Ancient Greek pronunciation: [sylːabɛ̌ː]). 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 ⟨μ⟩ ⟨m⟩ before the β b and a suffix -αν -an at the end.
Transcription In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the full stop ⟨.⟩ marks syllable breaks, as in the word "astronomical" ⟨/ˌæs.trə.ˈnɒm.ɪk.əl/⟩. 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 ⟨ˈ⟩ 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" ⟨/ʌndərˈstʊd/⟩ (though the syllable boundary may still be explicitly marked with a full stop, e.g. ⟨/ʌn.dər.ˈstʊd/⟩). 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 ⟨/lɛ.z‿a.mi/⟩. The liaison tie is also used to join lexical words into phonological words, for example hot dog ⟨/ˈhɒt‿dɒɡ/⟩. A Greek sigma, ⟨σ⟩, is used as a wild card for 'syllable', and a dollar/peso sign, ⟨$⟩, marks a syllable boundary where the usual fullstop might be misunderstood. For example, ⟨σσ⟩ is a pair of syllables, and ⟨V$⟩ is a syllable-final vowel.
Components
Onset–nucleus–rime segmentation In this framework, the general structure of a syllable (σ) consists of three segments grouped into two components:
Onset (ω): A consonant or consonant cluster, obligatory in some languages, optional or even restricted in others Rime (ρ): Right branch, contrasts with onset, splits into nucleus and coda Nucleus (ν): A vowel or syllabic consonant, obligatory in most languages Coda (κ): A consonant or consonant cluster, optional in some languages, highly restricted or prohibited in others The syllable is usually considered right-branching, i.e. nucleus and coda are grouped together as a "rime" and are only distinguished at the second level. The sounds occupying these positions may also be denoted with the following notation:
Consonant (C, or, for a consonant from a idiosyncratic set of possibilities, X) Obstruent (T) Nasal consonant (N) Liquid consonant (L) Glide (G, or, less often, H) Vowel (V) Tone (T, or, if there is a risk of confusion with an obstruent, ᵀ) an exact phoneme or even phone (any specific IPA symbol) possibly with the following notation to indicate occurrence count:
"Exactly one" (no exponent) "Zero or one" (surrounding parentheses or, more rarely, ? after the letter) "Zero or more" (* after the letter) "One or more" (+ after the letter) The nucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable. The onset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and the coda (literally 'tail') is the sound or sounds that follow the nucleus. They are sometimes collectively known as the shell. The term rime covers the nucleus plus coda. In the one-syllable English word cat, the nucleus is a (the sound that can be shouted or sung on its own), the onset c, the coda t, and the rime at. This syllable can be abstracted as a consonant-vowel-consonant syllable, abbreviated CVC. Languages vary greatly in the restrictions on the sounds making up the onset, nucleus and coda of a syllable, according to what is termed a language's phonotactics. Although every syllable has supra-segmental features, these are usually ignored if not semantically relevant, e.g. in tonal languages.
Chinese segmentation
In the syllable structure of Sinitic languages, the onset is replaced with an initial, and a semivowel or liquid forms another segment, called the medial. These four segments are grouped into two slightly different components:
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