So let’s talk about rhyming. It’s not hard to figure out what we can match together,
like fire and higher, or ferret and merit. But as words get longer, how do we know what
parts are relevant? We usually need more than a single bit of noise, like one consonant
or vowel, but less than a whole word – we need to find the middle ground for speech
sounds. And we’ve got a few syllables to share with you about what that looks like.
I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is The Ling Space.
So the sounds that make up our speech don’t just float around untethered like little balloons
inside our words. Every spoken language takes consonants and vowels and ties them together
into bundles. These are bigger than the sounds themselves, but not necessarily as big as
the whole word: and we call them syllables. Once we have our sounds organized into syllables,
then we’re ready to work up to building words.
But what exactly makes a syllable? The first and most important part that every syllable
needs is a core, a sound that holds the whole thing together. In this sense, a syllable
is just like an atom, because the sound that centers everything else is known as the nucleus.
The nucleus is the strongest and loudest thing that a syllable has to offer, and it gives
the other sounds something to orbit around and call home.
So not just any sound is qualified to be the nucleus of a syllable. It’s got to be loud
and strong. Some sounds are always allowed to form the nucleus of a syllable, across all languages,
and those are vowels. Any time you see a vowel, it gets to take up residence at the heart
of a syllable. It doesn’t matter what the vowel is – it could be [æ] or [i] or even
[ə]. If it’s a vowel, it’s a nucleus. Every vowel ever is a nucleus, forever.
And that's true even if you have two vowels next to each other with nothing in between, like in
naïve [nɑiv], or even three vowels next to each other, like in the Japanese word for blue, [aoi].
But some languages are more flexible with what’s allowed in the nucleus . Sometimes
you just can’t find a vowel, but you still need to make a syllable. In those cases,
maybe you can make do with something like [m] or [n], where the air can flow out freely
through your nose (if you don’t have a cold), or something like [l] or [ɹ], where the air isn’t really
impeded much in escaping your mouth. Languages like English, Czech, and Danish are totally fine with
this kind of behavior. Just look at the last syllable in something like [bætɫ̹] or [mawntn̩].There’s
no vowel between the [t] and either the [l] or the [n]. And because there isn’t one,
you just shrug and put the [l] or [n] into the nucleus of the syllable, and hope that it can handle the job.
Which they can!
But you can’t do this with just any consonant of English. Things with just a little bit
of air flow, like [f] or [s], or with no air flow at all, like [t] or [k], aren’t
strong enough to shoulder their own syllable. And this is pretty true across languages – the
more freely air can escape your body, the more likely the sound will be able to
do nucleus work. So vowels are good everywhere, strong, sonorous consonants like [l]
and [n] are pretty good in a lot of languages, and weak, stopped-up consonants like [k] and [t]
aren’t really that good anywhere.
But of course, there’s more to a syllable than what goes in the middle. We also want
to deal with the consonant sounds that come before and after the nucleus. Let’s start
with the ones that come before. These are known as onsets, and they lead up into the
nucleus. Languages really like these things; in fact, there are a lot of languages that require an onset
in order for a word to be okay to pronounce, like Arabic or Tagalog. In those languages, a string
of sounds like [ajɹow] would be bad as a word, because there isn't a consonant at the
beginning to serve as the onset.
And all languages are fine with having onsets, even if they don’t require one
at the beginning of every single syllable. You never get a language that doesn’t allow onsets
at all. So if you have something like [tɑf], then whatever language you’re in, that [t]
at the beginning will be in the onset of the syllable, leading up into the nucleus, [ɑ].
Some languages, like English, French, and German, like onsets so much that they’ll
even let more than one consonant appear at the beginning of the syllable. So for a word like
[snow], both [s] and [n] are onset consonants. But all languages use onsets, and all languages
allow syllables that consist of one consonant and one vowel.
Okay, but what about the consonants that come after vowels, at the end of syllables? Those
sounds are known as codas, and they have a more… complicated relationship with language.
Some languages are totally okay with them, and will let you put just about anything in a coda.
English is super permissive this way, and so any consonant other than [h] can show up
at the end of a syllable. So if we go back to [tɑf], the [f] at the end
is treated as a coda. Or if you have two consonants at the end, they can both fit into the coda.
So, that's like the [nd] at the end of something like [bɛnd].
But other languages don’t let you put just anything in the coda. So, languages like Japanese
only let you put in nasal consonants like [m] or [n]; and the only codas Mandarin
will let you have [n] and [ŋ], and sometimes [ɻ]. So Japanese could deal with a syllable
like [wan], where the [n] is allowed to go in the coda, but it couldn’t deal with a word
like what we saw before, [tɑf]. And some languages, like Hawaiian, don’t allow you
to have any codas at all. For them, consonants can only go into onsets.
So why are codas worse than onsets? Linguists have come up with a few different
explanations, but here’s a good one. Remember, vowels are the strongest and loudest sounds
- that’s why they get put in the nucleus. It turns out, it’s easier for us to tell
sounds apart when they're leading into the nucleus than leaving it. The acoustic information
is just easier to get at, and their influence on the shape of the vowel in the middle is
greater. So we like onsets more than codas, and more consonants will line up to get into Club
Onset than into Club Coda.
That means that when we’re in the middle of a word, and we have a consonant between
two vowels, as long as it’s a consonant that can get into Club Onset, it’s gonna want to go
there, and not be a coda. Think about a set of sounds like [pabu]. Now, we should have a choice
here: we could take that [b] and put it in the onset of Syllable 2, like [pa.bu], or
we stick it in the coda of Syllable 1, like [pab.u]. But since onsets are better than codas, and
since [b] has a Club Onset membership card for English, we go with option 1 every
time, where the [b] goes into the second syllable.
We only get codas in the middle of the word when the combination can’t go together
into the onset. So let’s consider a string like [tɛnzɪn]. The [n] at the end has to
go into the coda; there’s nowhere else for it to go. But let’s look at those
two consonants in the middle, [n] and [z]. [z] will go straight into the onset, because
it can, and it’s first in line. But what about [n]? Well, we can’t really have [nz]
at the beginning of a syllable in English; and we can sense this, because we can’t find
any English words that begin with [nz]. Like [nzæŋ] or anything. It’s not that we
can’t pronounce it. We just don’t allow it. So that means that [n] is gonna have
to give up and just go to Club Coda instead. It gets put in the coda of the first syllable,
and we end up with, [tɛn] and [zɪn].
So there’s one last thing for us to talk about regarding syllables, and it's
the question we started off with: how do we make rhymes? Like, how do we know what part of
the syllable is important for that? If we think about it, we can see it’s the last
part: it's the [ə] in Korra, or the [ɪn] in Bolin. The fact that that [ɪn] part
is the same in [tɛnzɪn] and [bolɪn] is what lets us know those two words rhyme. And now
we know, that’s the nucleus and the coda. So we actually group these together in the
syllable structure - the nucleus and the coda together form what's called the rime, and we mark
them off separately from the onset in our little tree. If the rimes rhyme, then
the words rhyme. And that shows us just how poetic phonology can be.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you bundled all my consonants
and vowels together, you learned that we group sounds into syllables
when we talk; that every syllable has a nucleus, which is usually a vowel, that's the strongest part;
that languages like onsets, which are the consonants that come before nuclei, but are
iffier on codas, the ones that come after them; and that the rime, the combination
of nucleus and coda, is what we care about for rhyming.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Élise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our production assistant is Georges Coulombe, our music and
sound design is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments
below, or you can take the discussion back over to our website, where we have some extra material
on this topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding
your own personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Mikit
tamu keng tutuki!