From: Ratson Naharadama <yahoo-arch AT heplist.com>
To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [b-hebrew] Re: What is a syllable?
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010 14:05:07 -0700
James Christian:
> In reality the segmentation is
> 'woul' and 'dyou' to produce
> two CV syllables.
Actually, this would not be accurate. You are correct if you would say
that the way that your sentence is pronounced would not produce the
syllable division as "would" followed by "you" (which is what you did
imply, so you are correct on that). However, the way that the sentence
would be parsed for syllables would not produce "woul" and "dyou",
neither. What it would produce (with most average English speakers, we
will ignore those persons who have been trained to enunciate a sentence
like this to produce "would" and "you" as clearly separate syllables)
would be the syllables "would" and "dyou". What happens in English
speech in this particular situation is the gemination of the final
consonant of "would" (the consonant becomes "long"). Spanish speakers
can frequently point out foreigners speaking spanish not only because of
vowel accent, vowel lengths, vowel colouring, and consonant colouring,
but also in that many Spanish consonants are pronounced geminate, even
though they are written with one letter (and the fact that most English
speakers aren't even aware of gemination). For example, "shovel" written
in Spanish is "pala" but it is pronounced with a geminate-L producing
"pal-la" (if you said "pa-la" to a Spanish speaker, their first response
will likely be to ask What? even if you are already holding a shovel in
your hand). While this doesn't really change the meaning of the word in
many cases (it does in some cases, and more often it does in, the
related, Italian language), in the Semitic languages, gemination is an
essential meaning changer in the language. For example, geminating the
second consonant of a verb frequently strengthens the meaning of the
verb (to break something becomes to utterly destroy or to shatter
something). If you geminate the firs consonant of a noun, you make that
noun definite (indefinite yôm (a day) becomes ayyôm (the day)). In
Arabic and Hebrew, the real use of the alif or heh in making something
definite is not the value of the consonant (in Arabic, this use of alif
does not carry its own sound, it is silent, the same is true for ancient
Hebrew, but it is frequently pronounced in modern Hebrew), but to carry
a vowel in front of the consonant that is to become geminate.
If a consonant can be geminate in Semitic languages, then why in all of
the consonantal scripts of these languages do they write them with only
one letter? Because , just like in Spanish, they saw it as one letter,
only its length was different (not the number of letters). However,
when you look at a semitic syllabic text and compare it to its
equivalent consonantal text, you will see not only long and short
vowels, but also long and short consonants spelled out.
--
Ratson Naharädama
Denver, Colorado