Re: Moraic codas [was Re: 'Yemls Morphology]

Mangiat sikayal:

> I tend to see English syllabification as a sort of a nightmare. When I
> started studying English in the Elementary School we were told to avoid
> writing a word on two lines because of the problems engendered by
> syllabification... so I've grown up without knowing how Englishmen actually
> break up words. Italian syllabification, OTOH, is really simple.
Actually, if you're just trying to hyphenate words properly, it's not too
difficult.  The rules are:

1. Don't leave fewer than 3 letters hanging before or after the hyphen
2. Break words across obvious morphemic boundaries
3. Otherwise, any VCV is broken V-CV
4. Any VCCV --> VC-CV
5. Any VCCCV --> VC-CCV

The notion of "obvious morphemic boundary" is kind of intuitive, but I
think, for example, that 'capable' is broken 'cap-able' in violation of
rule 3.  Otherwise, 'amateur' is 'ama-teur' (Rule 3), 'amassed' is
'amas-sed' (Rule 4) and 'constable' is 'con-stable' (Rule 5).

Not that those are the correct syllables in a linguistic sense.  Leaving
aside ambisyllabic consonants, English syllabification goes mostly
according to the Maximal Onset Principle--anything that can start a word
can and should start a syllable.  In my dialect:

'middle' ['mI.dl=]
'after' ['&f.tr=]
'constant' ['k_han.st@nt]
'mixture' ['mIks.tSr=]

For more detailed information you'll have to ask an English phonetician.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton

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