What Does syllable Mean
A Greek word derived in the Latin term syllăba and this one, in the word syllable . The notion refers to those sounds that, from a certain articulation, make up the same phonic nucleus , located between contiguous depressions of the voice .
It is possible to define a syllable, therefore, as a phonological division of a word . That is to say: words are divided into different units known as syllables. In syllables, in turn, one can distinguish between the syllabic attack , the syllabic nucleus and the syllabic coda .
The attack or syllabic start is the part that precedes the syllabic nucleus (the sector that has the highest sound intensity). After the syllabic nucleus, there is the syllabic coda. The syllable, therefore, is composed by the following sequence : syllabic attack - syllabic nucleus - syllabic coda .
One of the concepts that are closely related to the syllable is the phoneme . It is the smallest possible articulation of a vowel or consonant sound in a language. In addition, a phoneme is a fundamental theoretical unit that serves for the study of a language from a phonic-phonological point of view.
In short, a phoneme is the smallest unit into which we can fragment the sounds of a language. In order to determine if we are facing a phoneme, a distinctive function becomes necessary, sounds of the language that help us to differentiate one word from another. In this way, we can say that [b] and [p] are, in effect, phonemes of our language, since there are terms like / boat / and / pote /, whose meaning is different and their pronunciation only varies with respect to said sounds. .
While the nucleus of the syllable is formed by a diphthong or a vowel, the attack consists of no more than two phonemes (and, in some, it does not even appear). The coda, for its part, can be made up of one or two phonemes.
The division of a word into syllables is very important as it determines how the written words should be “cut” when a line is finished. This division is linked to diphthongs and hiatuses .
If a word has only one syllable, it is defined as a monosyllable . That is the case with words like bread , sun and cough . Words that have two syllables are bisyllables ( duck , frog , go up ); those of three syllables, trisyllables ( pancake , ground , peeled ); those with four syllables, tetrasyllables ( telephone , trash , building ), etc.
Our language has rules for word stress , which take into account the number of syllables or their characteristics. Despite this, one of the most common spelling mistakes is forgetting a tilde or using it when it should not be.
The syllable is one of those concepts that are fundamental in our language and that sometimes lead us to assume that they are also fundamental for the rest. However, just as there are languages without spelling accents, and others with a tonal accent instead of a lexicon, there are also some in which the syllable is not conceived in the same way, either because it has more or less importance, or because it is not. there is the possibility of using them to cut a word if it does not fit on a line.
Japanese, for example, is a very different language from ours, and in their case the syllables have a much higher value than ours, since in general they provide their own meaning to the words . Although in Spanish we have prefixes and suffixes, as well as roots from other languages that can often help us understand the origin of certain terms, in Japanese it is not necessary to refer to an etymology dictionary to understand the components of a word , since these are usually other words, also valid.