
Syllables without vowels? - tintinnabula
http://daily.jstor.org/syllables-without-vowels/
======
laurieg
I find it fascinating how we can often consider our own native language the
"obvious" way of doing things.

I once had a frustrated student talk to me about a Japanese colleagues
pronunciation. He said words like "fight" with the stereotypical vowel tacked
onto the end so they became "fighto". I explained that Japanese is divided up
in units like ka, bu, to and so on. The student replies "Why doesn't he just
say the first half of 'to'?" to which I replied "Try saying the first half of
'b'".

~~~
white-flame
Yet there's no problem for a Japanese person to say 'n' without trailing into
a connected vowel sound, and even using it as its own syllable.

Just not with any other consonant.

This confuses my gaijin brain.

(Also, the first half of "b" is "m'". :-P)

~~~
thaumasiotes
/m/ involves air flow (out through your nose) which is no part of a /b/.

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victorNicollet
As a romanian speaker, I would transliterate the "ssrksxt" as "sîrxt", which
contains the vowel "î" (similar to the turkish "ı"). Inserting that vowel
between some consonants is how we pronounce what would otherwise be consonant-
heavy words.

Following the same rules, "I meet" is pronounced "ntmpin" (spelled întâmpin),
and "song" is pronounced "cnt" (spelled cânt).

~~~
msravi
Exactly. The audio sample on the page does exactly this. And yet,
astonishingly, the author goes on to state:

"...these types of syllables, astonishingly, really do not contain any vowels,
epenthetic or otherwise"

when in fact, there clearly is an epenthetic vowel after the s.

~~~
gliese1337
You are being betrayed by your brain's powerful ability to find patterns that
aren't there. In this case, it's ability to fudge anything that sounds like
speech to fit into the boxes for phonemes that you are familiar with. This
what makes getting a good accent in a foreign language hard: if you don't
train yourself properly, you won't be able to _hear_ the correct
pronunciations, let alone reproduce them consistently.

The article addresses exactly this point, and acknowledges that plenty of
other linguists already argued for it. The counter argument is "I fed this
into a spectral analyzer, and there are no vowels on the spectrograph." Care
to claim your ears are more accurate than the computer?

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wwosik
Well, it's a known phenomen:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant)

E.g. in some West and South Slavic languages 'r' can be a syllable or its
core, while in Polish it underwent a transformation into 'er' or 'rz' \+
vowel.

~~~
BerislavLopac
A few Croatian examples, FWIW:

    
    
        prst: finger
        tvrd: hard
        krv: blood
        hrt: greyhound
        smrt: death
        trp: sea cucumber
        krt: without fat (e.g. meat)
        trk: act of running

~~~
anon4
Don't all these have a schwa when you say them?

~~~
BerislavLopac
Nope. [http://forvo.com/word/prst/#hr](http://forvo.com/word/prst/#hr)

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frobozz
This article fails to define what it means by a vowel. It is impossible to
have syllables without vowels if you use the phonological definition of vowel.

In Devanagari, an abugida that makes a clear distinction between vowels and
consonants, there are r and l vowels.

A continuant in a vocalic position in a syllable is a vowel. A continuant in a
consonantal position is a consonant. We see this in the opposite direction in
English with word-initial 'w' and 'y', both are continuants that make a sound
that could, in a vocalic position, likely be represented by one or more of the
aforementioned vowels of the Roman alphabet.

Non-continuants cannot occupy vowel positions, and there are no examples of
this in the article.

Even where, orthographically, a syllable is represented by a grapheme
typically considered to represent a stop consonant (e.g. k in Slovak), this
will normally represent the consonant and an unwritten vowel (e.g. a following
schwa).

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dvh
In Slovak language you can even have single consonant words: s=with, z=from,
k=to, v=in. I'm currently cleaning up Slovak corpus and trying to find all the
words without vowels but I have some 5000 more to go (there was 30000 words
but most of them are shortcuts). I think there will be around ~300 words.
Czech language will have more because they can use past tense masculine verb
without vowel - SK: zhltol, CZ: zhltl (chrt prv zhltl hrst zrn - grayhound
first swallowed handfull of seeds)

~~~
thaumasiotes
This is interesting; a k can't be pronounced in isolation (s, z, and v, being
fricatives, can). How does that k get realized in a sentence? Does it add on
to the end of the previous word, or the beginning of the next one? What if
it's in a really unfriendly context, e.g. following a word that ends with m
(is this possible?) and preceding another word that begins with m?

~~~
dvh
idem k mame - (I go) to (mom),

Only time when "k" changes into "ku" is if the next word start with k, g, q or
x: ku Karolovi, ku Gustavovi, ku Quidovi, ku Xylofónu

It is not added to previous or next word, but if you speak fast it would sound
like m'lady in english.

I don't have microphone here I'll check the waveform later.

Previous word ending has no effect whatsoever: zemiak k mäsu - potato to meat
(although in this case with Assimilation it may be pronounced as "zemiak g
mäsu" or "zemiak g'mäsu")

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AnimalMuppet
I seem to recall that at least around 1980, the Guinness Book of World Records
said that the hardest tongue-twister in the world was a Czech phrase that
translates "stick a finger in the throat". The whole phrase has no vowels in
Czech.

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Htsthbjig
I don't think a(n spoken) language without vowels exist.

In the article the mention Tashlhiyt Berber but then they put an example that
actually HAS VOWELS.

In "ssrksxt" there are not vowels in the script, but there are vowels in the
sound. I can hear at least two of them.

The fact that you don't write it down does not mean that it does not exist.

For example in English "spoken" is pronounced like ES- POU -KEN(1), even when
there is no "e" in the first S, actually the "e" vowel exist in the sound, and
you use two pure sounds when there is only one "o" in the middle.

On the other hand, vowels that exist on script does not need to exist in
sound. The typical example is Make, wich actually sounds like MEIK.

(1)If we consider pure vocal sounds as in Japanese, Spanish or Turkish.
English ha no clear sounds for vowels, but mixes pure sounds.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> For example in English "spoken" is pronounced like ES- POU -KEN(1), even
> when there is no "e" in the first S, actually the "e" vowel exist in the
> sound

This isn't true, but Spanish speakers will pronounce it that way. Spanish
doesn't allow sk- or sp- clusters at the beginning of words, so you can see
exactly what the phenomenon you describe sounds like.

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janvdberg
Aha! So that is where 'pg' got the cover art for his book Hackers & Painters
from.

~~~
BerislavLopac
No, this is:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babel_%28Bruegel%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babel_%28Bruegel%29)

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Zarathustra30
Do the words "Wild" and "Child" have one syllable or two?

