SYLLABLE STRUCTURE
The sounds that result from one chest pulse form a syllable. In its minimal form, a syllable consists of a vowel. In addition to the vowel a syllable may consist of one or more consonants that appear on either or both sides of the vowel. In some languages like Japanese, most often the syllable is composed of one consonant followed by one vowel. These languages are called syllabic languages. In syllabic languages, each syllable is represented by a symbol (called syllabary) in the writing system. The word TOYOTA from the Japanese language for example includes three syllables: TO, YO, and TA. Therefore, the syllable structure of most Japanese syllables is very simple: Consonant + Vowel (CV). Most languages are, however, alphabetic in that symbols (called characters or letters) in their orthography represent sound segments or phonemes rather than syllables. In these languages, the consonants and vowels are arrayed in a linear fashion to represent the syllables, words, sentences, etc. Arabic and Hebrew, however, tend to arrange their consonants in a linear fashion, and superscribe or subscribe their vowels as diacritics or sporadic features above or under their consonants. As such, Arabic and Hebrew can ironically be called betagamic rather than alphabetic languages.
Many of the most famous languages of the world, including English, are, however, alphabetic in the sense that they represent both their vowels and consonants in the form of letters in their orthography. In such languages, words are composed of one or more syllables. A syllable is a phonological unit composed of one or more phonemes. Every syllable has a nucleus, which is usually a vowel (but which may be a syllabic liquid or nasal). The nucleus may be preceded by one or more phonemes called the syllable onset and followed by one or more segments called the coda. English is an alphabetic language which has a complex syllable structure. The syllable structure of English has been presented in table 2.4 below.
Table 2.4 has used the symbol C to represent consonants and the symbol V to represent vowels. Notice that the syllable structure of English includes at least fifteen different types of syllables:
In this connection, it is interesting to notice that in alphabetic languages, the number of vowels that appear in a word can be used as an index for determining the number of syllables that make that word. A close look at the syllable structures presented in table 2.4 above reveals that, in English, consonant clusters can occur in both syllable-initial and syllable-final positions (i.e., as onset or coda). Moreover, consonant clusters are not limited to two consonants in English. In a word like street three consonants cluster together at the beginning of the syllable to produce a CCCVC syllable. Another interesting observation is that vowels can initiate syllables in English.
The syllable structure of Persian is, however, different. On the one hand, Persian syllables cannot be initiated with vowels; even words that seem to start with a vowel include the glottal stop /ʔ/ as the syllable onset. On the other hand, syllable-initial consonant clusters are impossible in Persian. In addition, syllable-final consonant clusters in Persian normally take no more than two consonants in their structure. As such, most Persian syllables belong in one of the three syllable structures (i.e., CV, CVC, or CVCC) presented in table 2.5 below. Take the following Persian examples:
The differences between the syllable structure of Persian and English are responsible for a good portion of Iranian EFL learners' pronunciation problems.
In fact, many Iranian EFL learners tend to insert the vowel /e/ in many mono syllabic English words to make them readily pronounceable. In addition, since Persian syllables cannot be initiated by vowels, many Iranian EFL learners start pronouncing vowel-initial English syllables with the consonant /ʔ/. The term Penglish is sometimes used to refer to Persian pronunciation of English words. The result of such mispronunciations is that many monosyllabic English words are rendered as bi- or tri-syllabic by some Iranian EFL students. Take the following examples:
