Re: syllable/word breaks

Alexandre Lang wrote:
>
> supposing a pronouncd a sentence very fast without any breaks to someone.
> Supposing also that that person knows the language, or at least all the
> rules of the language, but not any of the words in the sentence. Would
> that person be able to determine where syllables cut? where words cut?
Depends on what you mean by "very fast" and on the language.  :-)  If
it's not too fast for the hearer to make out individual sounds, than
syllable breaks should be easily definable for *most* languages (but a
few, like English, defy unambiguous syllabification).  In some
languages, you could figure out most of the word breaks (but things like
articles, prepositions, pronouns, etc, might not be parsable), in others
you'd have no hope.  Generally, if a language has a nice simply stress
rule like "initial syllables stressed" or "final syllables stressed",
and a simple phonology (e.g., CV) you'd be able to break it up into
words.  But, if a language is like English, for example, and stress is
variable, you'd have no clue, and a language that allows consonant
clusters would create ambiguities between, e.g., _miklas tran_ and
_miklast ran_ and _mikla stran_ (assuming none of these violate the
language's phonotactics).

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