Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:

> But we never reckon a silent final -e as a syllable:  "moon" and "tune"
> have the same number of syllables, namely one, and we are deeply confused
> when a francophone tells us that "pierre" has two syllables, since we
> can plainly hear that it has only one!
If you'll forgive me for going off a tangent, I was home sick the day back in
elementary school (3rd, possibly 2nd, year) they explained the concept of
syllable, so when we subsequently got an exercise list of words to be broken
down into syllables, I was rather confused. A helpful classmate, however, that
a "syllable begins with a consonant", which led me to hand in a whole paper of
words "syllabified" along the lines of s-t-re-j-k. The teacher subsequently
set me straight by explaining that a syllable centres of a vowel, and
the "begins with one consonant" ("a" and "one" being the same word in Swedish)
rule just applied to how to assign medial consonants and clusters.

Years later, as I began to develop and independent interest in language, and
started reading books on the subject, I realized that the concept of syllable
was supposed to apply not merely to writing, but also to pronunciation! (In
Swedish, like English, terminology.)

                                                       Andreas

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