Visiting Sacramento

[krasnoludek]

I just got back from spending the last two days up in Sacramento at my sister's place. My mom has been there too for the last six weeks, so even though things have been busy for me, I decided I should go up to see my mother before she returns to NJ and see my sister, niece and nephew while I'm at it. Ironically, I barely spent any time with my

Comments

[oxeador]

Spanish is simpler to break into syllables. It is quite easy, and there isn't any ambiguity ever (except maybe with words taken from other languages recently that have not found a stable form in Spanish yet).

[lingboy]

Yes, very true, but Spanish has no syllabic consonants and has quite simple syllable structure in general. English has syllabic nasals and liquids: e.g. [gɻ̩ɾɫ̩] girdle where both the "r" and "l" are syllabic, [pɹɪzm̩] prism where the "m" is syllabic, [ðɫ̩] they'll (in normal speech) where the "l" is syllabic, and [maʊnʔn̩] mountain where the "n" is syllabic.

It's also the case that Spanish doesn't have nearly as much vowel reduction and syllable deletion as in English, so words like "family" and "probably" have essentially lost the middle syllable (syncope). This has more to do with the rhythmic pattern of Spanish, which is syllable based (read: all syllables have equivalent duration) and the rhythmic pattern of English, which is stress-based (read: time between successive stresses is equivalent). One would not expect syllable reduction in a syllable-timed language, but it would occur in a stress-timed language.

[oxeador]

I tend to explain that Spanish is easy to break in syllables because it is phonetically poor. Kind of like Japanese, but not that extreme.

This has more to do with the rhythmic pattern of Spanish, which is syllable based (read: all syllables have equivalent duration) and the rhythmic pattern of English, which is stress-based (read: time between successive stresses is equivalent).

Which explains why poetry is so different between English and Spanish! It took me a long time to understand this. It may also explain why I am still waiting to hear an precise definition of what it means for two words to rhyme in English.

[lingboy]

For monosyllabic words, it means that both have the same "rime". A rime is a unit of the syllable consisting of the vowel and the coda (final consonants). So the word "went" and "spent" rhyme because they have equivalent rimes.

For polysyllabic words, it is more complicated. The words "pedantic" and "romantic" rhyme because everything from the rime of the stressed syllable up to the end of the word is the same.

As a side note, the unit "rime" is motivated by LOTS of independent evidence (tone, stress, weight, feature sharing). It wasn't just made up to explain rhyming, although its name is taken from the pattern.

The same principle (I think) holds for Spanish poetry. To quote Francisco Luis Bernández (last two estrofas from Soneto de Amor):

Desde que en este día sin reproche,
desde que en esta noche que no es noche,
desde que en este cielo que destierra,

desde que en esta tierra que no es tierra,
el corazón, ayer deshabitado,
vuelve a ser corazón enamorado.It may be corny (I actually like it), but note that "deshabitado" has

[once_a_banana]

Most of the problem stems from the tension between our morphological boundaries and the natural tendency in most languages towards syllables with onsets (rather than, say, syllables with a coda but followed by one with no onset). Morphology is way important in English, given how we've fossilized things in hundreds of years old spellings, which we actually depend on a great deal for understanding word relationships, etc. (and potentially increases readability). Dictionaries in general are more concerned with morphology and don't really know what phonology is (and why should they?). Of course then there are also lots of arbitrary notions like "if there's a double letter, put the hyphen in the middle" when in terms of pronunciation there is of course no double letter at all!

[krasnoludek]

yeah, these were exactly the considerations that were coming up and that I was aware of on a rudimentary level. It was frustrating because I was well aware I couldn't be consistent in my explanations because things were not anywhere as clearcut as the assignment would assume. Your example of the double letters is appropriate: the word after "diner" was "dinner" and I had trouble explaining to my niece why the test we had used on "diner" would suggest "dinner" should be broken up as "di-nner", yet the correct answer is to put the syllable break between the two n's. Anyway, don't have to deal with this anymore.