Syllable
Channel: 宇宙のすべての知識 プリンシピア
Date: 2019-04-01

Syllable, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44911 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Linguistic_units
#Phonotactics
#Phonology
Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. It is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word "ignite" is composed of two syllables: "ig" and "nite".

Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur. This shift from pictograms to syllables has been called "the most important advance in the history of writing".

A word that consists of a single syllable (like English "dog") is called a monosyllable (and is said to be "monosyllabic"). Similar terms include disyllable (and "disyllabic"; also "bisyllable" and "bisyllabic") for a word of two syllables; trisyllable (and "trisyllabic") for a word of three syllables; and polysyllable (and "polysyllabic"), which may refer either to a word of more than three syllables or to any word of more than one syllable.

"Syllable" is an Anglo-Norman variation of Old French "sillabe", from Latin "syllaba", from Koine Greek "syllabḗ" (). means "what is taken together", referring to letters that are taken together to make a single sound.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the period marks syllable breaks, such as in the word "astronomical" .

In practice, however, IPA transcription is typically divided into words by spaces, and often these spaces are also understood to be syllable breaks. In addition, the stress mark is placed immediately before a stressed syllable, and when the stressed syllable is in the middl...