
Counting syllables in "fire" and other words - gourneau
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/112732.html
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biotech
This is a question from "Google Answers", a website that ran from 2002 through
2006. People were paid a small amount (usually; occasionally the amount would
be reasonable) to do research (usually on the internet) and answer arbitrary
questions. In general, the quality of the answers was very high.

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Bud
I taught Singers' Diction in grad school for several years.

Technically, "fire" contains a triphthong, three vowels in a row, and is thus
one syllable. In International Phonetic Alphabet, it's [a] then [I] then a
schwa, which I can't type in ASCII.

The only other triphthong in English is the one in the word "our" or "hour",
which is [a], then [U], then a schwa.

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bdr
Can you shed any light on "owl"?

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michaelfairley
Depending on how much emphasis you put on the word, it can range from one to
two syllables. If you use it in a sentence ("The owl ate the mouse") spoken at
a conversational speed, the sounds that come from your mouth are likely to be
indistinguishable from saying the name Al. If you say the word slowly, you'll
have an [æ] (the vowel in cat) or an [a] (the first vowel in father), followed
by [wl̩] (sounds like a sheep's hair).

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Bud
This is just a straight up [aU] diphthong, one syllable, in virtually every
dictionary you can find. Certainly all the ones that use IPA. Same in my
compact OED (the tiny-print one that comes with a magnifying glass).

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nitrogen
Wow. Google actually listed a support e-mail address at the bottom of the
page. I'm floored.

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javaru
I'm amused that CMU listed two pronunciations but neither was that native
Pittsburgh pronunciation, which is the same as 'fur' on a dog.

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philwelch
Similarly, "squirreled" is considered by some to be the longest one-syllable
word in English (rhymes with "world").

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cperciva
Do these people pronounce "squirrel" as "squirl"? That seems... odd.

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michaelfairley
Most Americans I know use the latter, in which the r and l do not have a vowel
between the two.

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endtime
Are you from the southeast US? I've always heard "squih-ruhl". You also
mentioned pronouncing "owl" like Al, which doesn't sound right to me either.

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gourneau
#from <http://goo.gl/6U7f3> count syllables with nltk

from nltk.corpus import cmudict

d = cmudict.dict()

syllables = [len(list(y for y in x if y[-1].isdigit())) for x in d["count"]]

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endtime
Did you read the link?

>CMU's Pronouncing Dictionry (<http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-
bin/cmudict?in=fire>), however, indicates two possible pronunciations (F AY ER
| F AY R), the first of which seems to indicate a two-syllable word.

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frobozz
I'm surprised at the lack of variety-awareness in these answers. For me, there
is a clear distinction between higher and hire.

Isolated, fire is a tripthong. In connected speech, I'd hazard that it is a
monopthong.

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codingthewheel
When you burn someone in TF2, they scream.

