Re: English syllable structure
| From: | Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Wednesday, December 5, 2001, 19:05 |
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Dirk Elzinga wrote:
>> > Taking account of phonotactic patterns will trim the 30,000 figure
>>quite a
>>bit.
>>
>>True, but not, I imagine, to anywhere near the neighborhood of 400.
>
>400?!! I had understood 4000, which is closer to the figure of 5000 I
>once heard.
Cheng Zhong Su started the discussion by claiming that English has 400
"phonetic types", by which he seemed to mean syllables. 4000 was my attempt
at a conservative estimate of the number of possible English syllables.
In a later post, Cheng Zhong claimed that since English have about twenty
consonants and twenty vowels, it follows that it has 400 phonetic types -
he seems to be of the opinion that everything really is CV syllables
(which'd make "scratched" a word of five syllables or so).
Andreas
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