Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Hi,


> On the issue of the Hebrew/Phoenician alphabet: how could we tell if the
> originators/developers considered that a zero vowel was included in the
> options for a syllable?  If they did so, what would distinguish a sytem
> that
> records only consonants from a system that recorded consonant + vowel,
> including a zero vowel?  If they were familiar with systems that used CV
> symbols to represent C + zero vowel [like Akkadian], then it is not
> impossible that they would see that as an option.  I am not sure that the
> originators having a knowledge of other systems of writings should be
> excluded from the discussion.
>
> Kevin Riley
>
>
Excellent question. The kind of question we should be asking. What we need
is a scientific description of a syllable. Human judgements of where one
syllable ends and where the next syllable starts are subjective and, again,
pyscholinguistic factors come into play. For example, consider the English
sentence "What would you like me to do?". How do you think an unsuspecting
subject with no linguistic training would segment this sentence into
syllables? Surely we would expect 'would' and 'you' to be segments they
would choose representing the idea of a CVC and a CV syllable. This is a
classic example of how our writing is affecting our perception. In reality
the segmentation is 'woul' and 'dyou' to produce two CV syllables.

However, it gets even worse because when we attempt to develop consistent
algorithms that segment a speech signal into syllables we see that there are
subtle differences between what the algorithm came up with and what the
human judge comes up with. These boundary problems usually happen in
consonant clusters of some kind. Is the boundary the boundary at the
beginning of the consonant cluster (forming a single complex consonant)? Or
can we split the consonant cluster leaving a CVC syllable before the start
of the new syllable. Human judges are inconsistent largely infuenced by
their perception of words.

And so before we can really get into it we need to come up with a consistent
definition of syllable. We also need to come up with a definition of
perception of a syllable. And we also need to build some kind of model of
the perception of the syllable of the implementers of the alphabet.

James Christian