Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryant J. Williams III" <bjwvmw AT com-pair.net>]

Dear James,

In your example, "What would you like me to do?" you said,
"In reality the segmentation is 'woul' and 'dyou' to produce two CV 
syllables."

[Bryant]
The problem with "would you" is that the "L" (pronounced "el" - BTW a good
Scrabble word) is silent. Thus, it would be "uu-oud" and "yi-ou" if sounded 
out.

If one would go through the Dictionary, one would find that 26 letters of the
English alphabet have pronunciation symbols that, when pronounced out are real
interesting.

For example:

Aa - "1. the first letter of the English alphabet: from the Greek 'alpha', a
borrowing from the Phoenician. 2. the sound of 'A' or 'a': in English, the low
front vowel of (a) of 'hat, the low central vowel or low back vowel of (a with
umlaut) of 'father,' the mid front vowel of (long a) of bake, or the low back
vowel (o with arrow pointing up) of call...."

B. (be - long e) "...normally a voiced bilabial stop."

C. (se - long e) 1. the third letter of the English alphabet: from the Greek
"gamma", a borrowing from the Phoenician. 2. a sound of C or c: it is usually 
a
voiceless, alveolar fricative (s) before e, i, and y, snf voiceless, velar 
stop
before a, o, and u."

I think that the problem we are having is the same for the 22 letter Hebrew
alphabet: the symbols used to differentiate the various sounds heard.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Christian" <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>
To: "Kevin Riley" <klriley100 AT gmail.com>
Cc: "Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 23, 2010 4:26 AM
Subject: [b-hebrew] What is a syllable?


> 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
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