Friday, April 17, 2009

Mental

Roger Shuy posts on syllables at Language Log. It's a rambling and interesting post on what they are (or aren't) and also on vocalic consonants - are they syllables?

But he starts it by wondering why the intro graphic for The Mentalist shows it as men-tə-list when the root is "ment" and the L goes with "al", not "ist".the mentalist

I think he's confusing "syllables" and "morphemes", myself. Shuy says:
It’s about the way English words are split at the ends of lines in conventional writing. Even though the TV program couched it as the way the word is pronounced, the components simply aren’t oral syllables and it doesn’t seem to matter that they distort historical and morphological meanings.
But I disagree with him. Nobody pronounces it "ment-al-ist"; at least, nobody I know (or quick-surveyed) does. I'd say so over there, but it's a comments-closed post.

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5 Comments:

At 4:02 PM, April 17, 2009 Blogger Rana had this to say...

Sorry in advance - I have no qualification in linguistics and am only stabbing at intended meaning from Roger's slightly imperfect posting

but I think he implies the same as you, generally the word is always pronounced MEN-TAL-IST, and I think that he brought up morphemes only to emphasise only that it "should" perhaps be pronounced MENT-AL-IST according to etymology

and venturing even further from the boundaries of my knowledge, I found it interesting that he called "syllabic continuants" the letters l,m,n,r and hence they would not be regarded as true syllables at the end of the words used in the child's test. Yet those letters in the alphabet are only pronounced that way in English, "ell", "em" etc. In languages where the corresponding alphabet character is "la","ma", etc. would this distinction remain?

 
At 5:14 PM, April 17, 2009 Blogger John McKay had this to say...

My main annoyance with that graphic is that the definition shtick is so tired and worn out that I cringe every time I see it. The first couple of advertising campaigns that used it were moderately clever, but now it's a cliche. It's the sort of thing that makes me think the show producers ran out of money before creating the titles. When the showed their budget to the marketers, the marketers pulled out a well worn file and said, "for that much, we can give you a number thirty seven."

 
At 7:19 PM, April 17, 2009 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

John, I agree. Plus, who really ever needed the definition?

Rana - whether they're syllabic depends not on how the name of the letter is pronounced, but how they're pronounced in the word. In Serbian, for instance, the letter R is "er", yet in many words it's vocalic. Serb is spelled Srb, in fact.

In English, by no means are all instances of these letters syllabic. We generally spell those instances with an E, but they aren't really pronounced like ER EL EM or EN - and ER/RE and EL/LE show that we Anglophones just think we need to write a vowel.

 
At 7:40 PM, April 17, 2009 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

PS - Rana, never apologize for commenting. We don't all have to be experts to be interested!

 
At 10:29 PM, April 17, 2009 Anonymous Anonymous had this to say...

Shuy's post made me cringe repeatedly. I agree that he seems to be confusing syllables with morphemes, although I wonder whether there's another layer of confusion here--in the first part of the post, he seems to be talking about "syllabification" in the orthographic sense of figuring out where to hyphenate words, rather than in the phonological sense. And there are a couple of different hyphenation conventions out there, one of which pays more attention to syllable boundaries, the other to morpheme boundaries. So the apparent syllable/morpheme confusion may really be an orthography/linguistic structure confusion.

In the second part of the post, if Shuy is quoting the teacher correctly, then her definition of a syllable is completely absurd in a way that has nothing to do with vowels. Shuy quotes her as saying, "I teach the children that a syllable is a word containing a vowel sound." And then she read a list of words and asked the students to write down how many syllables were in each one--by her own definition, she was asking them "How many words are in this word?"

On a more nit-picking note, Shuy is mistaken when he describes /m/ and /n/ as "syllabic continuants"; in standard phonetic and phonological usage, the term "continuant" applies only to sounds in which the oral cavity is not completely blocked off. Nasals are sonorants, and can be syllabic in English and various other languages, but they aren't continuants.

In summary, gah. And also feh.

 

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