+Seth Thompson Thanks for the question! This is actually a really interesting question about different languages. While there are a good number of languages that require onsets, there aren't any languages that require codas. Some languages forbid them, and some languages restrict them to a subset of what consonants exist in the language. But there's no language that requires a coda to be in a syllable for the syllable to be acceptable. This could be for phonological reasons (e.g. codas are weaker positionally than onsets / we have a constraint that mediates against coda use) or phonetic ones (e.g. codas are harder to hear or differentiate between), but whatever lies underneath, typologically, it's the same: no language requires codas. Hope this helps! ^_^
There's one more reasons for the restrictions of the coda: There can be another syllable just next to it, from the same word, or form another word, and it may be confused with it, unless we introduce some stricter rules about which sounds can be in the coda. This facilitates separating words from continuous stream of sounds in speech.
Thanks a lot! I am Korean learning linguistic! It's so helpful to prepare final exams! I recommended my friends to see this video:) How about using Korean language examples in your video? Maybe me and my friends like a lot! :)
Sifaw II Thanks for the comment! The dialect we were drawing on was Tashlhiyt Berber. There's a paper on this topic by Rachid Ridouane in 2008 in the journal Phonology. According to Ridouane, who worked with a number of different speakers of Tashlhiyt, there are words (like [fqqs]) which have no vowels in them, either phonetically or phonologically, in that dialect, and he uses a number of methods to back that up. That said, Ridouane also notes that different dialects of Berber vary in this regard, so we maybe should have been more specific when we said it in the video. ^_^
It was funny to hear all the Avatar references, and I love your shirt :) Found this channel through your video about Arrival (which I saw today), even though I hardly understand the stuff I will subscribe haha
+Ava M. Glad you've found it useful! And the whole colour and visual design is thanks to our graphics team, atelierMuse - they really do a lot for us. I'll pass that comment on to them. ^_^
Of course you start right off with two words that (to me, characteristically) don't rhyme in my accent where they do in standard English. My "fire" is [fʌɪɚ] but my "higher" is [haɪɚ].
So, both l, m and n have kind of little schwas attached to them. How do linguists decide if it is a schwa or just the vowelly part of l? I always tell my students (some of whom want to put in an e or a in, say, spoil (spoyal). I tell the the /eh/ part is just that you mouth can't get back to l fast enough so it sort of adds a little vowel. For the consonant-le syllables, I tell them they work backwards, as if it were consonant-el
Diana Kennedy For /l/ in particular, if you're in a dialect (like most of North America) that has velarized or dark [ɫ], you get that extra vowel for precisely the reason that you suggest - moving from a front or mid vowel to the l sound requires you to go through the space for another vowel before you get to the [ɫ]. It wouldn't be confusing if English orthography were clearer, but that's an argument for a different day. But this being said, if you really want to be sure whether there was a vowel or not, you can look at a spectrogram; a schwa (or any other vowel) will look different from the acoustic profile of any of those consonants, so you can see if it shows up there. But for a language like English, we know the environment that these syllabic consonants can show up in - it's following an obstruent, at the end of a word, in an unstressed syllable. So we can be attuned to listening for whether there's a vowel or not in those circumstances. It's easier to tell just by ear, perhaps, for the nasals, where you can feel that no air is escaping the mouth anymore for the last syllable, and if there's no air leaving the mouth, there can't be a vowel there. Hope this helps!
In the video you give examples of languages that require onsets, or CV syllables, and mention that no language doesn't allow onsets, or in other words every language allows (C)V syllables. However, I don't think you mention languages requiring codas, or VC syllables. Do these exist?
Diana Kennedy Thanks for the question! Glad to have you back. I went back and listened to them just now, and you could, I suppose, make the case for there being a short schwa in my pronunciation of battle, but mountain doesn't sound to me as if it has a vowel in it at all. I could verify it with a spectrogram, if you'd like? And battle can certainly be pronounced without any vowel in that position at all. There is of course variation there - you can pronounce it with a schwa as the nucleus of that syllable, as well. But you can also have pronunciations where there isn't a vowel at all. Often the same person will pronounce it different ways, dependent on speech rate and what it's pronounced near. Hope this answers the question! ^_^
+The Ling Space I'm not a native speaker, but I don't actually pronounce the t in mountain. I replace it with a glottal stop. Listening to you say it, I think you do the same. It's actually very difficult for me to say mountain with a t and no stop. It sounds to me like I'm over-pronouncing the t, but I think that's because I am actually pronouncing it instead of replacing it by basically silence. Also, love the references. I got the shirt immediately, but it took me until Tenzin to notice there's more. Oh well...
+Yndostrui Yeah, of all of my t-shirts, this is one of my favourites, for sure. ^_^ I definitely get where you're coming from on that one, and I just sat around here for a bit going through and saying "mountain" in a few different sentential environments. I do think that there are some cases where I do have the glottal closure as you mention, and it's if I never release the closure at the alveolar ridge. Since [ntn] is all just alveolar stops of various kinds, if you don't release at all, then yeah, the glottal closure allows you to mark the /t/ as a voiceless segment. That string of sounds does make it easier to have the /t/ not fully realized, for sure. But I don't think you ever release the alveolar closure, right?
As an English speaker, I believe in England we say "mountAIn", not "mountn".. I think that's just your accent/stress, because you don't pronounce the "t" either. I definitely pronounce it "mountin", anyway
When we pronounce the word is called true t we say Mountain also but we Americans usually will use the flap t it's more silent you have the option between the true t or the flap t we will always pronounce the word with the true T mountains when we use the flap t it will sound like mounain it depends on you you have the option if we're reading it and don't be mountains with the T because we want to pronounce when we're with our friends we're lazy so the T BECOMES LAZY AND BECOMES SILENT MORE.
I also can say mountains depending on how I want to be pronounced sometimes I do say mountains but if I'm being lazy or tired that day I might leave the t a little softer that's called the flap t and I have that option I can call it mountains or leave it more silent we will always pronounce mountains mountains with the true t but we use the option of the flat T most of the time when we speak with our friends it's just being lazy
Only because Japanese adjectives can function as verbs. It's just omitting the word for "to be", because it's implied by context. "That blue." is an English "sentence" that can still be understood.
Avatar references get an A++
+fredstolemysocks2 Thanks! Glad you got them. They're a lot of fun. Hard to argue against fire ferrets. ^_^
Thanks a lot for this video. As I'm studying linguistics (english) right now, this is very helpful! Keep up the good work!
+RealDubstepTunes Thanks for the kind words! Glad you liked it. ^_^
Same here, many thanks for the video!
I feel like you're specifically teaching to me. I'm a giant Avatar fan and a Linguistics major!
Great! Glad you liked it. We like making people feel really welcome. ^_^
thumbed you up mostly for the legend of korra and avatar the last air bender references - including your shirt! ;)
K King Thanks for the kind words! We do try to theme all our examples around a particular thing each week; this one was a fun one to do. ^_^
+Seth Thompson Thanks for the question! This is actually a really interesting question about different languages. While there are a good number of languages that require onsets, there aren't any languages that require codas. Some languages forbid them, and some languages restrict them to a subset of what consonants exist in the language. But there's no language that requires a coda to be in a syllable for the syllable to be acceptable. This could be for phonological reasons (e.g. codas are weaker positionally than onsets / we have a constraint that mediates against coda use) or phonetic ones (e.g. codas are harder to hear or differentiate between), but whatever lies underneath, typologically, it's the same: no language requires codas. Hope this helps! ^_^
+The Ling Space Are there any languages which forbid onsets? (or at least have them highly restricted)
I am a Berber native speaker. I am not sure from which dialect you brought the world 'fqqs', however, in pronunciation it would be "fɛqqəs'
Did you write this comment just to fɛqqəs him?? ;-)
Tashelhit
It didn't take me long to get the avatar references, but man it took me the whole video to realize what shirt you were wearing lol
There's one more reasons for the restrictions of the coda: There can be another syllable just next to it, from the same word, or form another word, and it may be confused with it, unless we introduce some stricter rules about which sounds can be in the coda. This facilitates separating words from continuous stream of sounds in speech.
I love your videos. Thank you for all the help!
Thanks! Glad you like them, and glad we've been able to help! ^_^
Thanks for the great videos! They are very insightful.
Thanks! Glad to be able to help. ^_^
Thanks a lot! I am Korean learning linguistic! It's so helpful to prepare final exams! I recommended my friends to see this video:) How about using Korean language examples in your video? Maybe me and my friends like a lot! :)
Glad to help! We do have some Korean examples in some episodes, but we could definitely put in more. Thanks for watching! ^_^
That was creatively perfect
since i am studying teaching for english and have a linguistic exam coming up, this is very helpful! thank you for making such great videos!
Great! Thanks for the kind words. Glad to be able to help. ^_^
Thank you! My ADHD mind was having a hard time with my course book!
A struggling ling major student here. Btw, is that a figurine of Kanji Tatsumi from Persona4 behind you? Awesome!
It sure is! We're big P4 fans here at the Ling Space. ^_^
I, too, found this video quite useful. It can be diffictult to understand some topics without demonstration.
Sifaw II Thanks for the comment! The dialect we were drawing on was Tashlhiyt Berber. There's a paper on this topic by Rachid Ridouane in 2008 in the journal Phonology. According to Ridouane, who worked with a number of different speakers of Tashlhiyt, there are words (like [fqqs]) which have no vowels in them, either phonetically or phonologically, in that dialect, and he uses a number of methods to back that up.
That said, Ridouane also notes that different dialects of Berber vary in this regard, so we maybe should have been more specific when we said it in the video. ^_^
Too fast!!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!
+rageinsidethemachine You're welcome! Glad you liked it. ^_^
It was funny to hear all the Avatar references, and I love your shirt :)
Found this channel through your video about Arrival (which I saw today), even though I hardly understand the stuff I will subscribe haha
outstanding
+Ava M. Glad you've found it useful! And the whole colour and visual design is thanks to our graphics team, atelierMuse - they really do a lot for us. I'll pass that comment on to them. ^_^
Of course you start right off with two words that (to me, characteristically) don't rhyme in my accent where they do in standard English. My "fire" is [fʌɪɚ] but my "higher" is [haɪɚ].
Korra references!!! I am smiling so hard right now :) You explain very clearly, btw. Thank you for everything
Thanks! Great video as always. What's the reference for explaining the fact that onsets are greedy and will steal consonants?
Great videos! thanks.
+Nusrat Sabina Glad you like them! ^_^
Cool video!!! thanks!!
Thanks. Amazing.
It would be very helpful if you could explain in one of you future videos the phonological processes :)
ATLA references are rocking!
I love the Avatar references 😍
So, both l, m and n have kind of little schwas attached to them. How do linguists decide if it is a schwa or just the vowelly part of l? I always tell my students (some of whom want to put in an e or a in, say, spoil (spoyal). I tell the the /eh/ part is just that you mouth can't get back to l fast enough so it sort of adds a little vowel. For the consonant-le syllables, I tell them they work backwards, as if it were consonant-el
Diana Kennedy For /l/ in particular, if you're in a dialect (like most of North America) that has velarized or dark [ɫ], you get that extra vowel for precisely the reason that you suggest - moving from a front or mid vowel to the l sound requires you to go through the space for another vowel before you get to the [ɫ]. It wouldn't be confusing if English orthography were clearer, but that's an argument for a different day. But this being said, if you really want to be sure whether there was a vowel or not, you can look at a spectrogram; a schwa (or any other vowel) will look different from the acoustic profile of any of those consonants, so you can see if it shows up there. But for a language like English, we know the environment that these syllabic consonants can show up in - it's following an obstruent, at the end of a word, in an unstressed syllable. So we can be attuned to listening for whether there's a vowel or not in those circumstances. It's easier to tell just by ear, perhaps, for the nasals, where you can feel that no air is escaping the mouth anymore for the last syllable, and if there's no air leaving the mouth, there can't be a vowel there. Hope this helps!
what do I draw if a word has no onset or coda, do I just leave it blank?
In the video you give examples of languages that require onsets, or CV syllables, and mention that no language doesn't allow onsets, or in other words every language allows (C)V syllables.
However, I don't think you mention languages requiring codas, or VC syllables. Do these exist?
Is he using a kapampangan/pampango dialect in last word of his video?? which is "Mikit tamu king tutuki" means we'll see you next time.
loved the Avatar Korra theme ^-^
I would have explained battle and mountain as having a Schwa for their vowel, no?
Diana Kennedy Thanks for the question! Glad to have you back. I went back and listened to them just now, and you could, I suppose, make the case for there being a short schwa in my pronunciation of battle, but mountain doesn't sound to me as if it has a vowel in it at all. I could verify it with a spectrogram, if you'd like? And battle can certainly be pronounced without any vowel in that position at all. There is of course variation there - you can pronounce it with a schwa as the nucleus of that syllable, as well. But you can also have pronunciations where there isn't a vowel at all. Often the same person will pronounce it different ways, dependent on speech rate and what it's pronounced near. Hope this answers the question! ^_^
+The Ling Space I'm not a native speaker, but I don't actually pronounce the t in mountain. I replace it with a glottal stop. Listening to you say it, I think you do the same.
It's actually very difficult for me to say mountain with a t and no stop. It sounds to me like I'm over-pronouncing the t, but I think that's because I am actually pronouncing it instead of replacing it by basically silence.
Also, love the references. I got the shirt immediately, but it took me until Tenzin to notice there's more. Oh well...
+Yndostrui Yeah, of all of my t-shirts, this is one of my favourites, for sure. ^_^
I definitely get where you're coming from on that one, and I just sat around here for a bit going through and saying "mountain" in a few different sentential environments. I do think that there are some cases where I do have the glottal closure as you mention, and it's if I never release the closure at the alveolar ridge. Since [ntn] is all just alveolar stops of various kinds, if you don't release at all, then yeah, the glottal closure allows you to mark the /t/ as a voiceless segment. That string of sounds does make it easier to have the /t/ not fully realized, for sure. But I don't think you ever release the alveolar closure, right?
but what IS a syllable
no one seems to agree on a definition
thank you so much
+Kawaii Haneen You're welcome. Glad to be able to help. ^_^
+The Ling Space yeah i have an exam on Wednesday and i didnt understand until i saw you video you helped me a lot thanks again
əw, veɹi naɪs
+Il-Blue=Mon-lI θæŋks fɔɹ ðə kajnd wɚdz! ^_^
someone loves avatar lmao
As an English speaker, I believe in England we say "mountAIn", not "mountn".. I think that's just your accent/stress, because you don't pronounce the "t" either. I definitely pronounce it "mountin", anyway
When we pronounce the word is called true t we say Mountain also but we Americans usually will use the flap t it's more silent you have the option between the true t or the flap t we will always pronounce the word with the true T mountains when we use the flap t it will sound like mounain it depends on you you have the option if we're reading it and don't be mountains with the T because we want to pronounce when we're with our friends we're lazy so the T BECOMES LAZY AND BECOMES SILENT MORE.
I also can say mountains depending on how I want to be pronounced sometimes I do say mountains but if I'm being lazy or tired that day I might leave the t a little softer that's called the flap t and I have that option I can call it mountains or leave it more silent we will always pronounce mountains mountains with the true t but we use the option of the flat T most of the time when we speak with our friends it's just being lazy
how did you learn to much about pronunciation .
Sir speak slowly our understanding is little slow in yours language ☺
Thank you 🙄
UM, exCUSE me. "aoi" actually means "IS blue." Unsubbed.
Only because Japanese adjectives can function as verbs. It's just omitting the word for "to be", because it's implied by context. "That blue." is an English "sentence" that can still be understood.
Bolin is such a fraud 😂