X-Nico

unusual facts about syllable


Sonority

Syllables are associated with peaks of sonority (i.e., every syllable corresponds to a single sonority peak).


Adventures of Captain Vrungel

Pobeda (stress on the second syllable) is Russian for Victory, Beda(stress on second syllable) is Russian for Trouble.

Akiko Yosano

Midaregami is Akiko Yosano’s first tanka (31 syllable poems, arranged in 5-7-5-7-7) collection, published in 1901, which consists of around 400 poems.

Andrija Kačić Miošić

Using the ten-syllable verse of folk poetry and relying on Mavro Orbini and Pavao Ritter Vitezović, Kačić Miošić narrates and sings about the history of the Slavic peoples from the antiquity to his age.

Berlin, New York

The town is named after Berlin in Germany, although natives pronounce the name differently, with the accent on the first syllable.

Brian Moses

Few poets can hold a syllable so well as Brian, whether it's the hiss in 'The Snake Hotel' or the Tom Waits growl in 'Walking with my Iguana.'

Burmese names

Scholars such as Thant Myint-U have argued that the rise of complex Burmese personal names resulted from the collapse of the Burmese monarchy, which ended the sophisticated system of Pali-Burmese styles, crown service and gentry titles, leaving the majority of Burmese with single syllable names.

Chandogya Upanishad

Later khandas of this chapter describe various modes of singing Sama, upasana on holy syllable OM, three Savana's, their respective gods and Sama's to them.

Chinese exonyms

"London Heathrow Airport" is usually rendered in Chinese text as 倫敦希斯路機場 (Lúndūn Xīsīlù Jīchǎng), with the English pronunciation of 'London' fairly accurate, and of 'Heathrow' less accurate: literally as Chinese this means "kinship, honest" (for London), "hope/rare, given/this, road" (for Heathrow), "aircraft, field", with the last syllable of "Heathrow" rendered as "lu" although the more accurate "lo" and "lou" are known Chinese words.

Corolla, North Carolina

The usual pronunciation of local residents stresses the second syllable like all (Kuh-RAH-Luh, /kəˈrɑːlə/), however many outsiders pronounce Corolla the same as they pronounce the name of the car, the Toyota Corolla, where the second syllable sounds like roe (Kuh-ROE-Luh, /kəˈroʊlə/).

Cursor Mundi

Its nearly 30,000 lines of eight-syllable couplets are linguistically important as a solid record of the Northumbrian English dialect of the era, and it is therefore the most-often quoted single work in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Fornes dialects

Fornes (second syllable stressed) is the dialect native to Forni di Sopra and Forni di Sotto, two villages which, from 1300 to 1700 AD, were governed separately from the surrounding areas by the Savorgnani family of Venice and known as 'I Forni Savorgnani'.

Korean language

Possibly to avoid referring to Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il or Kim Jong-un as the enemy, the second syllable of "enemy" is written and pronounced 쑤 in the North.

Kwahu

The "h" was put in by Swiss missionaries from Basel, who added the "h" to ensure that Kwa, the first syllable, was not pronounced as "eh." The "h" is not separately pronounced in the name.

Kyōtamba, Kyoto

Its name comes from the first syllable of Kyōto and the former town of Tamba, a namesake of the historic Tamba Province.

Language education

For example, to teach the name ‘Mussorgsky' a teacher will pronounce the last syllable: -sky, and have the student repeat it.

Latvian declension

2nd declension two-syllable male names never undergo consonant shift (Uldis, Artis, Gatis, and so forth.) Besides body parts (acs, auss) there is a number of other words that historically do not undergo consonant shift, e.g., the name of the town of Cēsis.

Louis Vola

As well as the Hot Club de France, Vola (the second syllable is stressed) played bass for Ray Ventura, Duke Ellington and singer Charles Trenet.

Malcolm Gluck

Gluck's other controversial statements include, "Terroir is rubbish. It is complete utter balderdash from the first syllable of its pretentious and mendacious utterance to its last".

Michael Glycas

A poem of some 15-syllable verses, written in 1158/1159 during his imprisonment on a charge of slandering a neighbor and containing an appeal to the emperor Manuel I, is extant, and is commonly regarded as the first dated work of Modern Greek literature, since it contains several vernacular proverbs.

Mind rhyme

"Something You Can Do with Your Finger" from South Park uses enjambment to replace taboo words with non-taboo phrases with the same initial syllable.

Montra

The term Montra, though rarely, is used as a girls name nowadays and should not be confused with the Indian word mantra, which is a religious or mystical syllable or poem, typically from the Sanskrit language.

Old Persian

The phoneme /r/ can also form a syllable peak; both the way Persian names with syllabic /r/ (such as Brdiya) are rendered in Elamite and its further development in Middle Persian suggest that before the syllabic /r/, an epenthetic vowel i had developed already in the Old Persian period, which later became u after labials.

Phonology

In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, i.e. replace one another in different forms of the same morpheme (allomorphs), as well as, for example, syllable structure, stress, feature geometry, accent, and intonation.

Rabbi Ishmael

Ishmael was of opinion that the Torah was conveyed in the language of man (Yerushalmi Yevamot, viii. 8d; Yerushalmi Nedarim, i. 36c), and that therefore a seemingly pleonastic word or syllable can not be taken as a basis for new deductions.

Reading education in the United States

Mrs J. C. Gorham produced three such works, Gulliver's Travels in words of one syllable (1896), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland retold in words of one syllable (1905), and Black Beauty retold in words of one syllable (1905).

Reforms of Russian orthography

The Russian orthography was made simpler by unifying several adjectival and pronominal inflections, replacing the letters ѣ (Yat) with е, і (depending on the context of Moscovian pronunciation) and ѵ with и, ѳ with ф, and dropping the archaic mute yer, including the ъ (the "hard sign") in final position following consonants (thus eliminating practically the last graphical remnant of the Old Slavonic open-syllable system).

Senath, Missouri

It is named after an early settler, Asenath Douglass, who was commonly called Senath and in whose family her Bible-derived name Asenath was pronounced with a long "e" and with stress on the second syllable.

Solfège

In Anglo-Saxon countries, "si" was changed to "ti" by Sarah Glover in the nineteenth century so that every syllable might begin with a different letter.

Syllable Desktop

Syllable Desktop is a free and open source operating system for Pentium and compatible processors.

Tartessian language

The script used in the mint of Salacia (Alcácer do Sal, Portugal) from around 200 BC may be related to the Tartessian script, though it has no syllable-vowel redundancy; violations of this are known, but it is not clear if the language of this mint corresponds with the language of the stelae (de Hoz 2010).

Traditional English pronunciation of Latin

However, for the purposes of determining whether a syllable is open or closed, these single consonants continue to act as consonant clusters.

Young-hee

Kim Yong-Hee (born 1978), South Korean male football player, whose name is spelled differently in Korean (the second syllable is 용 rather than 영)

Yuri Podladchikov

His nickname is "IPod", taken from the vowel "i" of his first name and the first syllable of his last name.


see also