Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 2:26 PM, James Christian wrote:

> 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.

It is nice for you to describe a "subject with no linguistic training."
What are the formal requirements for the linguistic training that he lacks?
The fact of the matter is that "would you" is two syllables: CVC and CV.
If your algorithm parses it a different way, it's not a correct view of 
reality.
It's a bug in your algorithm.  (In software, the user is the one that issues
the formal requirements of the program.  So if the user wants a program
that parses syllables a certain way -- the way he or she perceives them --, a
program that parses it any other way is simply buggy.)
Furthermore, the division: woul, dyou is not "two CV syllables" but CV and
CCV, respectively.

Yitzhak Sapir