Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

And after reading a reply like this I'm supposed to believe you are well
trained in phonology...

There is very little, almost none, correspondence between what is written on
the page with 'would you' and how this is actually pronounced by native
speakers in a natural context. It is to CV syllables. Not a CV and a CCV.
The 'dy' sound is represented by one phoneme in IPA (not that I'm advocating
IPA).

James Christian

2010/1/23 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
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