#syllable structure

For this Wednesday’s video shoutout, we’re going to combine it a bit again with LSA followup. This is a video on phonotactics from Artifexian, a channel that talks about worldbuilding, including constructed languages. We’ve talked about conlangs before ourselves, but Artifexian deals with putting a language and world together, which is pretty cool. This particular episode talks about deciding how a language should put together its syllables, and some of the rules languages choose from for that.

A really interesting article about how babies learn Japanese. Excerpt: 

Nissan, Toyota, Honda — three universally recognized car manufacturers, two of which are also common Japanese surnames. If you ask an English speaker to tell you which name is longest, they’ll say Toyota, with its three syllables. A Japanese speaker, on the other hand, will say Nissan. This difference reveals a lot about the underlying rhythms used in human vocal communication, says developmental neurolinguist Reiko Mazuka of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, and also casts doubt on universal theories of language-learning that are mostly based on studies of English speakers.

So why is Nissan longer to Japanese ears? It’s all based on ‘mora’, a counter of linguistic rhythm that is distinct from stress (like in German or English) or syllable (like in French). Most people are familiar with this pattern of counting from haiku, the five–seven–five pattern that defines the classical Japanese meter. The ‘syllables’ in haiku aren’t really syllables but rather morae. Nissan thus has four morae of equal duration (ニッサン or ni-s-sa-n), rather than just the two syllables picked up by Western ears.

But Japanese babies are not born with an internal mora counter, and this is what got Mazuka so interested in returning to Japan from the United States, where she completed her PhD and still maintains a research professorship at Duke University. “The Japanese language doesn’t quite fit with the dominant theories,” she says, “and I used to think this was because Japanese was exceptional. Now my feeling is, Japanese is not an exception. Rather, what works for English is not universal” in terms of mechanisms for language learning.

Mazuka’s lab on the outskirts of Tokyo studies upwards of 1,000 babies a year, and she explains that infants start to recognize mora as a phonemic unit at about 10 months of age. “Infants have to learn how duration and pitch are used as cues in language,” she says. And Japanese is one of the few languages in the world that contains duration-based phonemic contrasts — what English speakers think of as short and long vowels, for example — that can distinguish one mora from two morae. Dominant ideas in the field suggest all babies, from birth, use rhythm as a ‘bootstrap’ to start segmenting sounds into speech, first identifying whether they are dealing with a syllable- or stress-based language. “The theory says that rhythm comes first, but Japanese babies can’t count morae until they’re almost a year old,” Mazuka exclaims. “You can’t conclude that rhythm is the driving force of early phonological development, when evidence from Japanese babies shows it’s not an a prioriunit.”

A phonology joke from brynguist on twitter:

me: smongoose. snarwhal. phonologist: okayyy but-- me: sclemur. strhinocerous. phonologist: but that's not-- me: stracoon. sclamprey. phonologist: oKAY BUT that's not what maximal onset principle means me: ... schwombat

Because I’m into explaining the joke, for reference, the maximal onset principle actually refers to a thing you do when you’re breaking up a word into syllables. First, you figure out the centres (nuclei) of all the syllables, which generally correspond to the vowels. Then, you look at the remaining consonants and put them in the onset of the existing syllables where possible (the maximize the onset principle). Then any consonants that can’t be onsets get associated with the vowel that comes before them (they become part of the rime/rhyme of the previous syllable). 

Thus, lamprey has two syllables because it has two vowels, one for each nucleus, and they’re divided as lam.prey rather than lamp.rey or lampr.ey because pr- is a good onset for English (there are English words that begin with pr-, like prey), even though -mp is also a perfectly good coda for English (we have words like lamp). It’s also not la.mprey (even though that would be a more maximal onset) because English doesn’t have any words that begin with mpr- (i.e. mpr- is not a licit onset in English). Other languages have different maximum onsets, but they all follow the maximal onset principle for their own syllable constraints. 

The maximal onset principle gets treated in intro linguistics classes as if it’s an arbitrary procedure that you need to follow, but it’s really a descriptive generalization of a thing that languages do: we say mon.goose not mong.oose, le.mur not lem.ur, rhi.no.ce.rous not rhin.oc.er.ous, ra.coon not rac.oon, lam.prey not lamp.rey, and wom.bat not womb.at. We notice this in things like the pronunciation of “c” -- it’s like /s/ in rhinocerous and like /k/ in raccoon because “c” is affected by the vowel that comes after it, the vowel that’s in the same syllable as long as we maximize the onset. 

How do we put together our syllables? Where do the consonants and vowels go inside our words? This week on The Ling Space, we talk about syllable structure: how we fit the sounds together, how we decide what consonants go where, and how we know what makes words rhyme.

laałatłá laasí yaa’saá

Homorganic diphthongs contrast in perceived length with their monophthongal counterparts. There are no heterorganic diphthongs. It is important to note that the IPA should reflect a sequence of two vowels and not a lengthened vowel (e.g., /aa/ not /aː/). This is an important distinction to be made because of morae (see §2.2.0 — SYLLABLE STRUCTURE and §2.3.0 — PITCH ACCENT).

Minimal Pair: 

 tłar /t͡ɬa˞/ grammatical particle signaling the instrumental -tłaar /t͡ɬaa˞/ “to kill, to destroy”

good question! this has to do with a feature I haven’t discussed yet in the grammar, but it’s pitch accent. Basically łaá siri has a very simple tone system which I classify as pitch accent. The “tone” is distinguished on certain (predictable) syllables and it always occurs on the second mora. So, for instance, the pitch accent of a syllable like the one from the grammar would be: 

‹’a+ár› L+H