The definition of a word is, a word is a meaningful combination of sounds. That is a word is a combination of sounds, which also gives us some meaning. We say it is a meaningful combination because a word must give some meaning. We know there are two types of sounds, some are consonant sounds, and some are vowel sounds. To be precise, in English, there are 20 vowel sounds and 24 consonant sounds. And these many 44 sounds are responsible for all possible words that we know, or we do not know in
English. But when we talk about words, there is another thing called syllables
what is a syllable?
- A syllable is something, which is bigger than a sound or and smaller than a word, which simply means, a syllable can have one or more than one sounds in it.
- But, a syllable is part of a word in a sense that, a word could be just one syllable.
- There are several words which are just one-syllable words.
- They are the words are syllable in themselves, and they are called monosyllabic words.
- it is possible that one word may have one word will definitely have one syllable, but one word may have more than one syllables.
- One word may have two, three, four, five, sometimes more than five syllables as well.
- But in general what we find is monosyllabic words, words with two syllables, words with three syllables are very common.
- That is, there are so many in numbers in English.
- When words become heavier in terms of a number of syllables, words with four syllables, words with five syllables and words with six syllables, the total number of possible words start decreasing.
- That is simply because of the weight.
- A heavier word is more difficult to pronounce, to speak, and therefore we do not have too heavy words too many of them.
- The basic point is, a syllable is a unit, which could have multiple sounds, and there could be multiple syllables in a word.
- Therefore we say it is bigger than a sound but is smaller than a word.
- When we look at a syllable, we also want to know at the same constraint on that, that there must be a vowel sound in a syllable.
- Remember and try to draw inference from what we know about a word.
- What we know about a word is there must be a vowel sound in a word. S
- o it follows from the point that there must be a vowel sound in every syllable.
- And this requirement of a vowel sound in every syllable is called the nucleus of the syllable.
- Nucleus means the fundamental basis.
- And this is the reason why we say vowel sounds are more basic units of a word.
- Because a word is not possible without, every word has a vowel sound because every word has at least one syllable in it and every syllable requires the nucleus.
- And this nucleus can only be a vowel sound.
- Apart from this nucleus, it could have an initial and final sounds in it.
- So they are called there are different names, but there could be more than one sound in a syllable.
- It is possible to have one-syllable words, two- syllable words, three-syllable words and four-syllable words.
Words And Syllables
Words with one syllables
- So words with one syllable are examples are son.
- There are some, this word also has one syllable only, son. Life, break, tongue.
- Please do not look at the sounds also.
- The way we identify a word, a syllable is if there is no break, then no break in the pronunciation of a word, in the way we speak a word, then they are monosyllabic word.
- Son, life, break tongue, these are all monosyllabic words without a break.
Two Syllable Words
- Words like tiger, police, between.
- When we say the word tiger, we see after this one; there is a break.
- Ti-ger.
- Ti is one syllable, ger is another syllable.
- Police. Po is one syllable, lice is another syllable.
- Between, bit is one syllable, and ween is another syllable.
- Between bit-ween. This is a two-syllable word, between, between.
- So when we see in two-syllable words, each syllable, like ti two syllables of tiger ti-ger.
- Both the syllables have one vowel sound in them. aai in ti the vowel sound in ti is aai ti ger; aa in the second syllable.
- When we say ger, g a r.
- There is a vowel sound a in this syllable as well.
- So ti-ger.
- Police, p and o police.
- L i s police.
- Between, b i t first syllable v e n second syllable.
- So in a word with two syllables, we have only taken two, three examples.
- We see each syllable has got a vowel sound in it.
- So this also tells us that a syllable is bigger than a sound but is smaller than a word.
Three Syllables Sounds
- Energy, e-ner-gii.
- Heritage, he-ri-tez heritage.
- This word capital ka-pi-tal. Suffering, saf-far-ing suffering.
- And then you will see breaking these points and three syllables in each one of them.
- Each syllable with a vowel sound in it.
Four Syllables Sounds
- They are invisible, aquarium education, infinity.
- In-vi-si-ble, a-qua-rii-am, e-du-ke-shan and in-fi-ni-tii. So e-du-ke- shan four syllables.
- Infinity in-fi-ni-tii.
- Aquarium, a-qua-rii-am.
- So there are breaks between syllables in a word, and every syllable must have a vowel sound in it.
Syllabification
- The rules of syllabification is intuitive to speakers of English.
- There are not rules that can tell us about how syllabification is actually done.
- we try to speak the way, that is speak with proper syllables that is proper syllabification identifying each syllable, then we sound very close to the way it should be spoken.
- So, instead of saying so if we say four-syllable words with only two breaks, then they could be misunderstood and sometimes not intelligible to hear us.
- when we identify them, we want to speak using this syllabification.
- We need to identify these syllables when we speak.
- And the composition of syllables is going to be helpful for us, that is our when we know that every syllable must have a vowel sound, this knowledge will help us check the syllabification process.
- we look at syllables.
Parts Of Syllables
- syllable must have a nucleus.
- The other things in other parts of the syllables are known as onset, rhyme, coda and these,
- nucleus that a vowel or a syllabic consonant is obligatory in most languages.
- A vowel must be the nucleus.
- Then we have a coda.
- And whenever we have words in English have more than two syllables, one of them is more accentuated.
- That is one of them is more stressed.
Words
- When we move beyond words, we see words fall in different categories.
- And these categories are known as parts of a speech in traditional grammars.
- So we have words fall in grammatical categories, and we can also call them grammatical categories like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns.
- Prepositions, conjunction, determiners, and interjections.
- So these are several examples of parts of a speech.
- We only need to understand things properly.
- We need to slow down our speed; we need to write, we need to look at the details, we need to look at nuances, subtlety and pay attention to them.
- slowing down means is to pay proper attention to them.
- This process builds our understanding stronger.
- And once our understanding becomes stronger about these nuances, they start showing up when we speak. This is the most robust process of learning.
- All possible words in our spoken language can be identified in some of these categories
- These categories also become important when we start looking at sentences.
- Therefore they are called parts of a speech.
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