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I was always taught that a word contains as many syllables as it has vowels. By definition, a vowel is a sound that produces a syllable.

On the other hand, in English phonology, by definition, diphthong is two adjacent vowels which produce one syllable. I did not hear about diphthongs until I read some literature about English phonology.

I am aware about long vowels (which produce one syllable) and vowel hiatus (two consecutive vowels) which produce two syllables. So what is the proof that English diphthongs are actually two vowels which produce one syllable, as opposed to long vowels, hiatus, or a vowel followed by a consonant?

Anixx
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  • Consonants can be syllabic too. For example in the English words "kitten", "Bible", and "wager" (American English) the final /n/, /l/ and /r/ are all syllabic. Syllabic sounds are just more sonorant in relation to neighbouring sounds. – Moss Aug 16 '13 at 17:54
  • @Moss consonant is by definition, a sound that is non-syllabic. All the words you cite are mono-syllabic or two-syllabic (if the e is pronounced). – Anixx Aug 17 '13 at 09:16
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    I am afraid you are mistaken. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant. Pay no attention to the spelling of words, especially in English. Sounds fall into sets of varying sonority. From least to greatest: obstruents, liquids, nasals, vowels. Languages differ in where they set the threshold for what can be syllabic. In English, as my examples show, we allow everything but obstruents. The language Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber even allows obstruents to be syllabic. – Moss Aug 17 '13 at 17:10
  • Poetry and poetic structure of texts (aka prosody). Some knowledge about moras might also help. – Manjusri Aug 15 '13 at 00:47
  • @Moss this is a very controversial theory and definitely contradicts all what I was taught. – Anixx Aug 18 '13 at 08:48
  • @Moss And their examples are weird: they give a word even and claim it has two syllables, which is definitely untrue, it has only one syllable or possibly they use some non-standard definition of syllable. – Anixx Aug 18 '13 at 08:50
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    This is standard phonology. What teaching have you had (in what field)? "Even" is definitely two syllables (why is it spelled with two vowels?) – Moss Aug 19 '13 at 18:42
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    I agree with @Moss on this, it is the standard view in phonology/phonetics. My favourite example in English is 'rock'n'roll', which has a clearly syllabic /n/, so it consists of 3 syllables. And then there's the common Vietnamese surname 'Ng', which is a single consonant and syllable. – Gaston Ümlaut Aug 20 '13 at 06:53
  • @Moss okay, I agree that "even" can be pronounced either with two or one syllable. If to, then the "e" before "n" is pronounced. – Anixx Aug 20 '13 at 07:35
  • @Gaston Ümlaut I always thought, that in "rock'n'roll" "n" pronounced as "en". Is it untrue? I was never exposed to spoken English. If it is pronounced just as "n" then the phrase consists of just two syllables. – Anixx Aug 20 '13 at 07:36
  • @Gaston Ümlaut I do not know how they pronounce "Ng" (maybe they insert prothetic vowels), but if they pronounce it without vowels, why do you think it has a syllable at all? There are word without a syllable, for example, Russian prepositions "в", "к". – Anixx Aug 20 '13 at 07:40
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    I can only repeat (again!) what @Moss has said: this is standard phonology. – Gaston Ümlaut Aug 21 '13 at 02:08
  • @Gaston Ümlaut it is possibly what they in your country. – Anixx Aug 21 '13 at 08:34
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    If you're suggesting that it's only in linguistics in my country that this view is held, you're wrong. Any standard introductory text on phonology that discusses syllable structure will include discussion of syllabic consonants, the sonority hierarchy, etc – Gaston Ümlaut Aug 22 '13 at 04:27
  • @Gaston Ümlaut this is untrue. All books I read claimed that a vowel, by definition is a syllabic sound, and consonants never produce syllables, the number of vowels always defines the number of syllables. – Anixx Aug 22 '13 at 07:43
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    What are the books you're reading that are telling you these things? Can you tell me of a textbook in phonology that says syllables can never have a consonant as nucleus? Try this online textbook on introductory English phonology--see p 105 re syllabic consonants. – Gaston Ümlaut Aug 23 '13 at 00:11
  • @Gaston Ümlaut well, no surprise, this is an English-specific book. This whole idea is local to English-speaking phonologists. – Anixx Aug 23 '13 at 03:19
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    I have worked with linguists from many different countries and languages: all accept syllabic consonants as non-controversial. Please name a textbook in phonology in any language that says that syllables can never have a consonant as nucleus. – Gaston Ümlaut Aug 23 '13 at 05:59
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    Here are linguists from all over the world discussing the varieties of syllabic consonant and the languages they're found in, including Russian. – Gaston Ümlaut Aug 23 '13 at 06:07
  • @Gaston Ümlaut if somebody found syllabic consonant in Russian, they are really weird. But I agree, they can find anything with their own definition of "consonant". (note, in the word "Пётр" which is claimed there to have a syllabic consonant, there is actually only one syllable). – Anixx Aug 23 '13 at 06:23
  • @Gaston Ümlaut "So, how many syllables in the word Пётр? If we replace syllables with claps, how many claps we will do in this word? Of course, one!" - from exercizes for children of higher underschool age http://pedlib.ru/Books/2/0160/2_0160-334.shtml It is so basic that even do not know how to discuss with people who does not know these things. – Anixx Nov 16 '14 at 21:08
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    @Anixx Sorry for the typo in my edit (any for many). Your statement regarding Пётр confuses me, but I have no Russian. In English, with a word like Peter — phonemically /ˈpitɚ/ so phonetically [ˈpʰiːtɚ], [ˈpʰiːtə], [ˈpʰiɾɚ], [ˈpʰiɾɻ̩ʷ] (etc.) depending on dialect/accent and notational/transcription convention — your test for claps would come out with two of them in any English dialect I know. Is Russian truly different in this, or is it just a different tradition? FYI, I highly recommend the paper by F. Sánchez Miret whose link I provided in a comment to Gaston Ümlaut’s answer. – tchrist Nov 16 '14 at 21:26
  • @tchrist I think in Russian the word is pronounced differently from English. Normative pronounciation of Пётр [п'отр], метр [м'этр] etc includes only one syllable. The word for wind, for instance, has two variants, ветер and ветр. The later is archaic and poetic (used when a poet needs a 1-syllable word). Yet even in English if u pronounce it with two syllables, you pronounce a vowel (that is shwa or something). It is not that u can pronounce it with two syllables but without a vowel. – Anixx Nov 16 '14 at 22:16
  • Getting back to your original question, you may want to look at this related question: http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1577/rationale-for-diphthongs – musicallinguist Nov 16 '14 at 22:22

8 Answers8

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In thinking about this it's important to distinguish between phonetics and phonology.

Phonetically a diphthong is a sequence of two vowel targets, wherein the tongue starts at one vowel position and moves to another. For this reason it may sometimes be described as a combination of vowel and glide, but it's best to understand the articulatory facts of what it involves, movement from one tongue 'vowel' position to another, as opposed to the steady-state articulation found in simple 'monopthongal' vowels.

The evidence for this can come from simply hearing the vowel movement, as well as from various kinds of imaging such as spectrograms, ultrasounds, x-rays, etc.

Phonologically such an articulation can function as a single phoneme, as in the diphthongs of English. But a sequence of two phonemes consisting of vowel + vowel, or vowel + glide, can (eg in fast speech) be phonetically identical to a diphthong.

As for English diphthongs, a standard phonemic analysis of English will reveal a set of vowel phonemes. In every variety of English that I'm aware of some of those vowel phonemes will be realised as diphthongs, involving an articulatory movement from one vowel target to another, as revealed by the kinds of evidence already mentioned. Some of the evidence of the phonemic status of these diphthongs in English includes:

  • standard minimal sets: 'beet, bit, bet, bait, bite, boat, bout, bought, boot' etc
  • Diphthong as sole syllabic nucleus, eg 'how', 'boat', 'I'
  • Participation in same tense-lax contrasts as monopthongal vowels, eg 'divine-divinity', cf. 'serene-serenity'
Gaston Ümlaut
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Defining a diphthong as a sequence of two vowels may not be correct. A diphthong is a sequence comprising a vowel and a glide, at least, according to the Summer Institute of Linguistics: http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsADiphthong.htm

A glide, or semivowel, is defined at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glide_%28linguistics%29 as “a sound, such as English /w/ or /j/, that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.” In other words, a sound that is like a vowel, but non-syllabic.

When the glide comes first in the diphthong, we have words such as British “new” [nju], in which [j] as in "yes" [jɛs] is the glide.

When the glide comes last in the diphthong, we have words like English “aisle” [aɪ̯l], in which [ɪ̯] is the glide.

Note the little curve symbol under the <ɪ>, yielding <ɪ̯>. That little curve, called an inverted breve, means that the vowel sound is non-syllabic, i.e. that it’s a glide.

Incidentally, vowels aren’t the only sounds that can be syllable nuclei. Consider syllabic consonants, such as the [̯̯̯̯l̩] in “bottle” [bɑdl̩]. Also see the examples mentioned with this definition of syllabic consonants: http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsASyllabicConsonant.htm

James Grossmann
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  • Sorry, but who said that y and w in English are semivowels if everywhere else they are consonants? – Anixx Aug 15 '13 at 09:04
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    Right, especially in Welsh and Swedish w and y respectively are consonants :-))) – Manjusri Aug 15 '13 at 09:41
  • Neither semivowels nor consonants can be syllable nuclei, but I'd be interested to know more about the terminological issues surrounding the term "glide" or "semivowel." I still need to figure out how to ask the question, though. – James Grossmann Aug 16 '13 at 02:42
  • 'Semivowels' are usually defined as non-syllabic segments which have a vocalic articulation, so it's part of their definition that they are not syllabic nuclei. And doesn't your comment '...nor consonants can be syllabic nuclei' contradict your answer where you say 'Consider syllabic consonants...'? – Gaston Ümlaut Aug 16 '13 at 03:32
  • I have to admit that you're right on both counts. – James Grossmann Aug 16 '13 at 05:16
  • @Gaston Ümlaut in your answer you claimed that diphtongs differ from a vowel+glide in that diphthongs have two vowel targets, but now you say that the glides have vocalic articulation. So what's the difference between vowel+glide from a diphthong then? – Anixx Aug 22 '13 at 07:51
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    @Anixx No I did not say that. I think you're confusing phonetics and phonology. These two levels have to be kept separate, which is what I did in my answer. – Gaston Ümlaut Aug 23 '13 at 00:25
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In fact, loosely speaking, there is just one continuous vibration or wave in one syllable with one, two or more vowels. Those syllables with more than one vowel are just due to the writing system, and it just designates the location of tongue when the tongue moves, not saying that two vowels are put together to form part of one syllable or one syllable.

You may record the sound of several syllables with more than one vowel by computer and take a look at a diagram of its spectrum or wave with Praat, they are all continuous.

But if you do the same experiment on several syllables when you speak continuously, you may almost always find there is a break or almost weakest energy between diagrams of wave or spectrum of the syllables or two vowels that sound as two syllables.

hippietrail
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XL _At_Here_There
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    I found a handy PPT that introduces the concept of reading spectrograms, talks about the characteristics of diphthongs in spectograms, and gives a few examples. – acattle Aug 16 '13 at 02:46
  • @acattle,Excellent,but to tell you the truth,I have not read any such introductory material,although I think there must be some research done on such a question.Thank you for your URL – XL _At_Here_There Aug 16 '13 at 03:39
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You asked if English diphthongs could be analyzed instead as long vowels, but that doesn't make sense. Long vowels don't change in quality (phonologically) over their duration. But you are asking about sounds such as "hey", "no", "cow", "toy", which clearly do change. Actually, I realize you probably have a confusion of definitions between linguistic long vowels and "long vowels" as taught in elementary school.

Could it be vowel hiatus? Well that would mean that each vowel is treated as belonging in a separate syllable. But in the example words I gave above, we English speakers clearly treat those as monosyllabic.

So the real tricky question is whether these sequences are true VV diphthongs or actually VC and CV glides. The tricky thing is that all the glides in my dialect of English (Western Canadian) end on either a [j] or [w] sound, which, when I say it that way would mean these aren't really diphthongs. But [j] can also be interpreted as [i] and [w] as [u].

To me it is instinctive that they are phonological diphthongs, but that is probably not a good enough answer. But ask yourself, do you consider the "y" in "fly" to be a legitimate vowel sound in English or merely an [a] sound followed by a [j]? It is curious that 4 out of the 5 names of our vowels in english are actually pronounced as diphthongs. As Manjusri hinted at, an understanding of moras would be helpful. Briefly, a diphthong in any language must have two moras (same with long vowels), however a glide belongs in either the onset (no mora) of a syllable or in its coda. Then things get complicated. Depending on the language, and depending on sound, the coda may or may not carry a mora. Unfortunately I think English is ambiguous about this. If it could be shown that the purported [j] or [w] at the end of a syllable had no mora then that would be proof that it is really a glide sitting in the coda rather than the second half of a diphthong, sitting in the nucleus. I don't think you can find such proof though.

Moss
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  • Actually, in Dutch long and short vowels do change in quality over their duration. – Manjusri Aug 16 '13 at 21:14
  • Maybe they do incidentally (phonetically). If it is a noticeable change to a non-linguist native speaker then I would say it is a diphthong, not a long vowel, linguistically speaking, regardless of how Dutch teachers describe it. (See the link in my answer.) I don't know the phenomena you are referring to in Dutch though. – Moss Aug 16 '13 at 21:17
  • Actually I would say "long vowel" isn't that well-defined, at least not outside linguistics. For instance many of the long vowels in languages such as Finnish and Hungarian are felt by native speakers to be "pure" but turn out to phonologically have more than one target, which makes them diphthongs. Even in English people feel that the "a" in "hate" is a long vowel for instance. English speakers have trouble making pure vowels when learning new languages as adults and are likely not to even know the words "phoneme" or "diphthong". – hippietrail Aug 17 '13 at 08:52
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    I'm sure there is all sorts of confusion about what a long vowel is outside of linguistics. I don't think you are correct however about what you are saying about Finnish. I am pretty familiar with its phonology. "Each short monophthong has a long counterpart with no real difference in acoustic quality." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_phonology But it also claims that long vowels are percieved as two separate vowels which would make them a case of vowel hiatus. – Moss Aug 17 '13 at 17:18
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    It looks like I misremembered about long vowels in Hungarian and Finnish. All I can find now is that in Hungarian the quality changes as well as the length but long vowels do not diphthongize. – hippietrail Aug 18 '13 at 04:27
  • @hippietrail Re:"more than one target, which makes them diphthongs"--more then two targets would make them polyphtongs, if such exists, which would have me wondering, whether ... half+phthongs (after musical halftones, which describes the frequency) would be a good description of those long vowels. – vectory Apr 03 '19 at 16:42
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The other answers have raised many important aspects why diphthongs are a useful concept, and I'd like to add some points that I personally feel are crucial in this debate.

Proofs

I'm not sure insisting on a proof of the existence of diphthongs will help you understand why many use the concept diphthong to analyse language. There is no proof that they exist because they don't. They are an abstraction (just like the phoneme), a way of analysing or describing language and the same phenomenon can be described in many different ways.

There isn't any proof of gravity either - if an apple falls down, and you insist it's because of gravity I could still say it's because it is the nature of apples to fall down to Earth or that God likes apples to fall down etc. and we'd be no wiser. However, you could say that your theory of gravity explains a whole lot of other things at the same time, such as pears falling down and celestial bodies rotating around each other. In this sense gravity is a very elegant concept because it explains many phenomena at the same time.

Diphthongs are not combinations of monophthongs

In the same way I can point out how diphthongs allow a more elegant description of (for example) English phonology. There are 12 monophthongs in English (RP). If we allow combinations of two monophthongs we should expect to find all or almost all such combinations - 12!/(12-2)! = 132. But there are only 8 diphthongs in English (RP).

Of course we could come up with a number of rules stating that such an such monophthongs cannot occur together. We would need so many such rules that our description of English phonology would become bloated. Diphthongs are a more elegant abstraction for describing the sound system of English.

Syllables

Sverre pointed out that syllables must contain a single vowel and if there is movement from one vowel target to another then the syllable contains a diphthong. You argued that

One can define a vowel through syllable, or syllable through vowel

and I agree that there is a certain circularity here. But syllables also have a definition independent of that. A syllable consists of a sonority (basically, loudness) peak and has sonority troughs (little loudness/acoustic energy) as boundaries. This solves the circularity of the syllable -> diphthong argument. And if the vowel contained in a syllable has two articulatory targets it is a diphthong.

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robert
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  • Re second bold title: you compared use of diphthongs to a combination of vowels. Why not compare it to a combination of vowel+consonant? Re third title: why you consider diphtong a vowel rather than vowel+another sound? – Anixx Aug 25 '13 at 19:39
  • You can analyse /eɪ, aɪ, ɔɪ/ as combinations of monophthong + /j/ and /aʊ, əʊ/ as monophthong + /w/. But in many dialects of English there are /ɪə, eə, ʊə/ and there is no consonant that can replace the second target here. For dialects that lack these three diphthongs (such as some descriptions of General American), the other diphthongs can indeed be analysed as vowel + consonant. – robert Aug 25 '13 at 19:52
  • @robert If you wanted to, you could use a "nonsyllabic schwa" /ə̯/ as the second element in centering diphthongs. (Now, I don't know why you would ever want to, except to prove a point, but you could.) – Draconis Mar 30 '19 at 19:55
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A diphthong is a moving vowel, in other words the articulatory apparatus undergoes a significant change of status during the articulation of. The organs of articulation change position; so that you can say a diphthong consists of three constituents, the origin, the destination and the trajectory. Diphthongs are often regarded as being two vowels, di+phthong. They are indicated symbolically by a symbol that indicates the origin, followed directly by a symbol that indicates the target or destination. The diphthong, however, is really the trajectory between these two. There are three basic types of falling diphthong in English: those that target [j], such as "eye", those that target [w], such as "ow", and those that fall in towards the centre of the vowel space (the so-called centring diphthongs), such as "air". A centring diphthong can be analysed as a diphthong of one of the other two types, followed contiguously by an R-sound, though for non-rhotic speakers the actual R merges with the centring diphthong and becomes inaudible. [i:] & [u:] could also be analysed as diphthongs, viz. [ij] & [uw]. If that were the case, we could list some twelve diphthongs in English. There are four which target [j]: [ij], [ej], [aj] & [oj], as in bee, bay, buy boy. There are four which target [w]: [uw], [ew], [aw] & [ow], as in moo, sew, cow & bowl. And the are possibly four centring diphthong, if we can count "ur" as a centring diphthong that begins at the centre and targets itself. There are "ear", "oor" as in "tour", "air" & "ur". How to symbolize these without the I.P.A. characters I don't know.

Elvin Gwyn
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    While your answer is totally correct, I think OP is asking "why do we call [aj] a diphthong in English, when we call it a vowel plus a consonant in Japanese?" – Draconis Mar 30 '19 at 19:54
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The other answers here are excellent and give good evidence. But here's another way of looking at it, from a phonological viewpoint.

Phonologically, the distinction is really between "syllabic" (acts as a nucleus) and "nonsyllabic" (doesn't act as a nucleus).

The division into "consonant" and "vowel" is pretty arbitrary, and you can't always draw a nice line between the two. In Chinese, fricatives can be syllabic; in English, nasals and laterals can be. Many languages have pairs of phonemes that are exactly the same except one is syllabic and the other isn't (such as /i/ and /j/). In PIE, *i and *j are reconstructed as allophones: is that phoneme a consonant or a vowel? In the context of this answer, when I say "vowel" I mean "something on the IPA vowel diagram", and when I say "consonant" I mean "something on the IPA consonant diagram"—but either of those can be either syllabic or non-syllabic.

Sometimes, it's pretty clear that you have a vowel + glide sequence, with two separate phonemes. For example, in Japanese, /j/ acts just like any other non-syllabic consonant: you can have /aka/, and /aja/, and even /a.ika/, but not */ajka/. So in Japanese, it makes sense to analyze [aj] as an underlying /a/ (syllabic) plus a /j/ (non-syllabic).

Sometimes, though, it's pretty clear that you only have a single phoneme. In English, the sequence [aj] acts just like any other syllabic phoneme. It can come before all sorts of codas, as in geist and likes, where other syllabic+non-syllabic sequences can't. And the [j] never comes "detached", even to satisfy the Maximal Onset Principle: in my dialect, for example, your is [jɹ̩], but liar is [laj.ɹ̩]. So it makes sense to say that /aj/ is a single phoneme in English, because that analysis is more elegant and explains all the data nicely.

And that's what a diphthong is: a series of multiple different phones, that acts as a single phoneme. The same can be said for affricates: phonetically, [tʃ] is a stop followed by a fricative. But if you call it an affricate, you're saying that those two sounds act as a single phonemic consonant. (In Swahili, for example, /tʃ/ patterns with the stops: it acts like a /k/ or a /t/, not like a sequence of consonant-plus-consonant.)

P.S. Like with anything in phonology, there's no indisputable "proof" of this. Phonemes aren't something we can see or measure directly. Instead, I'm saying that this theory, with diphthongs in it, explains the English evidence in a nice way. Maybe someday someone will come up with a different theory with no diphthongs involved! But for now, this theory is the most solid one I know of, and that's sort of the general consensus among linguists as a whole.

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Draconis
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  • (If you downvoted, please explain why?) – Draconis Mar 30 '19 at 20:14
  • /i/ and /j/ cannot be described as being the same except syllabic or not. That they are somehow associated in many languages and written with the same letter is simply a coincidence. "In Chinese, fricatives can be syllabic; in English, nasals and laterals can be" - consonants cannot be syllabic in ANY language. The very definition of vowel is that it produces a syllable. – Anixx Mar 30 '19 at 20:19
  • "phonetically, [tʃ] is a stop followed by a fricative" NO. Russian distinguishes between [tʃ] and [t͡ʃ] as well as [ts] and [t͡s] as a sequence of consonants and as an affricate. They are pronounced and written differently. For instance, чета (a pair) and тщета (uselessness), отсел (re-sat at a distance) vs оцел (archaic for steel), отсвет (blur) vs оцвет (end of flowering), отселить (resettle) and оцелить (give an aim). – Anixx Mar 30 '19 at 20:43
  • @Anixx Google "syllabic consonant". They exist in General American English, Mandarin Chinese, Sanskrit, Czech, Swahili, and many other languages. And are you saying that [tʃ] isn't a stop followed by a fricative? In Russian, /tʃ/ and /t͡ʃ/ are phonemically different, and pronounced differently, yes. The former is two phonemes, the latter is one. But the phonetic difference isn't "affricate versus sequence". – Draconis Mar 30 '19 at 20:50
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    @Anixx (Also, look at spectrograms of [i] versus [j]. Their similarity isn't a coincidence.) – Draconis Mar 30 '19 at 20:51
  • "They exist in General American English, Mandarin Chinese, Sanskrit, Czech, Swahili, and many other languages." - in all cases of claimed "syllabic consonants" I am aware of they turned out as a combination of a vowel and a consonant written with one letter. And, the definition of a vowel as a syllable-producing sound is classic in Russia and is taught since school. "But the phonetic difference isn't "affricate versus sequence"" - it IS. The former is two consonants, the second is one affricate. If you call [tʃ] an affricate, you are simply plain wrong. – Anixx Mar 30 '19 at 21:17
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    @Anixx: Have you looked into syllabic nasals (/m/ and /ŋ/) in Cantonese? I'd be pretty surprised if you can justify there being a vowel there, phonetically or phonologically... And in any case, there's more than one definition for most linguistic terminology. Until you make the definition that bans consonants from being syllabic the standard one, you can't really say he's wrong. – WavesWashSands Mar 30 '19 at 23:28
  • @WavesWashSands It's the standaed one. " I'd be pretty surprised if you can justify there being a vowel there, phonetically or phonologically..." - what's your definition of vowel then? – Anixx Mar 31 '19 at 02:06
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    @Anixx As I've said in my answer, the vowel vs consonant distinction isn't really a useful one. In the context of the answer, a "vowel" is something on the IPA vowel chart, while a "consonant" is something on the IPA consonant chart. Either can be either syllabic or non-syllabic, or a single phoneme can even be both depending on the context (as in English, Swahili, PIE). – Draconis Mar 31 '19 at 02:10
  • @Draconis and what's the principle behind putting something into vowel or consonant chart in your theory then? A phone cannot be in some places syllabic, while in others not. A phoneme can, under some weird definitions of phonemes. In English there are no phonemes that can be syllabic or non-syllabic, and syllabification in PIE is largely unknown. – Anixx Mar 31 '19 at 02:23
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    @Anixx I think the IPA distinction is honestly a mistake. Compare the relationship between [u] and [w], to the relationship between [i] and [j]. It's not at all obvious that these pairs are analogous in the IPA chart, but if you look at the spectrograms the relationship is clear. (General American English also does have phonemes that can be syllabic or non-syllabic, in most analyses: /n/, /m/, /l/, /r/. The alternative is postulating an extra phoneme that never appears on the surface, which is less elegant imo.) – Draconis Mar 31 '19 at 02:40
  • @Draconis in Latin [u] and [w] were denoted by a single letter (which has rootsa in PIE), so possibly from this comes your confusion. In Hebrew for instance, [u], [o] and [v] are denoted by the same letter (so we have here a 3-way distinction). There are also cases when fricatives and laryngeals are denoted by the same letters as vowels (a, e, etc). This does not men that those consonants are the same thing as vowels. The consonent [j] has non-palatalized and voiceless and voiceless non-palatalized analogs, so if forms a classic consonantal quadruple cell.: [j]-[xʲ]/[ɣ]-[x]. – Anixx Mar 31 '19 at 10:50
  • "never appears on the surface" - do you mean, in writing? Can you give some examples where the phonemes are syllabic in your view? – Anixx Mar 31 '19 at 10:50
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By definition, a vowel is a sound that produces a syllable.

And what is the definition of a syllable? Taking dictionary.com as an example, syllable is defined as "an uninterrupted segment of speech consisting of a vowel [...] (with or without preceding or following consonant sounds)".

I'm sure you can see where this is going.

Sverre
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  • One can define a vowel through syllable, or syllable through vowel, but as your quote agrees, a syllable must contain a vowel. – Anixx Aug 22 '13 at 14:53
  • What I wanted to point out is that these definitions are problematic because the two terms define each other. By defining A as B and B as A, we are no closer to understanding what A and B are. – Sverre Aug 22 '13 at 16:01
  • This doesn't account for syllabic consonants, unless you definite such consonants to be vowels in otherwise vowelless syllables. But then you're really making it difficult for yourself. – hippietrail Aug 24 '13 at 16:30
  • @hippietrail: Is that comment directed at me? – Sverre Aug 25 '13 at 12:38
  • @Sverre: I don't know - just for whoever was following the ideas here. – hippietrail Aug 25 '13 at 15:38
  • @hippietrail or one can define that a syllabic consonant is always surrounded by prothetic (axillary) vowels which are not phonemic, or just that there is no syllable here at all. – Anixx Aug 25 '13 at 19:41