 I remember when I was in, like, second grade or something, we were being taught how to write haikus, and part of that was learning how to count syllables, because, you know, you have to make sure you have the right number of syllables per line. And I had a lot of trouble with this. One thing my teachers told me to do was to clap out the syllable, like, the river has water. I was like, yeah, but you can just as easily be, like, the river has water, or the river has water, whatever you want. They assumed that I was just being intentionally difficult, which, to be fair, was something I did a lot. After all, they thought, if you just tried to copy what they're doing with the clapping method, you start to just feel the natural rhythm of language and gain a sort of intuitive sense of where the syllable boundaries are. And they were kind of right. I did have an intuitive sense of it, and I did eventually successfully write a haiku along with everyone else. But what I had difficulty expressing was that no one could give me an actual definition of what a syllable was, or even a way to tell where the syllables are without relying on what your gut tells you. Roughly a decade later, I'm in college studying linguistics, and I find that, still, no one could give me an answer, and I'm still frustrated. I've found that even in legit academic journals about linguistics, there is no universal definition of what a syllable is, or any algorithm for determining where they are. So, if no one can tell us what a syllable is, then how do we even know they're even a thing? What makes us think syllables even exist? Well, denying the existence of syllables turns out to be pretty tricky. For one thing, there's poetry. People from all around the world, from every language and dialect, have songs and poems, and have their own poetic traditions, which tend to have regular numbers of syllables per line. Another interesting, more recent piece of evidence is the fact that babies, when they're just learning to speak, tend to rhythmically alternate between open mouth and closed mouth positions, and that this rhythmic alternation looks like it might sort of slowly turn into normal speech with syllables, indicating that we might intuitively divide up speech into units consisting of a single sort of opening of the mouth-ish thing. But most compelling of all is the fact that everyone in the world seems to just sort of have this intuitive idea of what a syllable is. Like, take a bunch of people who all speak the same language and tell them to divide up a given phrase into syllables, and they'll usually come up with the exact same thing, or it'll at least be really close. It might just be psychological, but clearly we're dividing words into these groups of sounds in our heads, and besides, it's difficult to deny the existence of something that you can just kinda feel is there. So, over time, linguists have come up with different ideas about what might make a syllable a syllable. Perhaps the oldest suggestion dates back to the 1920s. A researcher named R.H. Stetson theorized that when we speak, there are pulses of activity in our lungs and diaphragm, and that a syllable consists of a single constriction of respiratory muscles. Initial data sort of supported this, but later research in the 50s that used electrodes to monitor people's muscle activity found that this hypothesis did not hold up. Another idea relies on the principle of co-articulation. You see, linguists like to imagine that speech is composed of a string of speech sounds, where each sound is pronounced the same everywhere, but we know that this isn't really true. Sounds change their pronunciation depending on what's around them. People will round their lips when they pronounce consonants that occur next to ooo sounds. When vowels occur next to nasal sounds like m or n, the vowels tend to take on a more nasal quality. So, maybe syllables represent a sort of region of co-articulation. A space within a word where sounds tend to bleed into each other, being pronounced as one big blend of noise, but without bleeding into other syllables. At least as much. This idea gained some ground in the 60s, but was followed by a large body of work showing that no, co-articulation is way more complicated than that. That sounds can and do bleed over and affect the pronunciation of sounds in other syllables. And that in general, everything varies a lot depending on what language we're talking about and what sounds there aren't exactly where the syllable boundary is, and it's just all very complicated. By the 80s, some researchers were starting to consider that maybe syllables really don't exist. All that stuff I said earlier about how we have an intuitive grasp of what a syllable is, well, maybe that's just a product of our culture. After all, people who speak different languages will very often look at the same set of sounds and disagree on where the syllable boundaries are. One study from 1988 says, It should be noted that the status of syllable boundaries has come into question in a number of studies on co-articulation, and some acoustic analyses have even led to outright rejection of syllables as intuitively given. And yet it was around this rather pessimistic time that the modern conception of a syllable began to take form. You see, one of the big things that linguists use the idea of a syllable for is to make rules about how different sounds are pronounced. So, maybe that should be how we define syllables. Maybe a syllable is a part of a word that starts with sounds that act like they're at the beginning of a syllable and ends with sounds that act like they're at the end of a syllable. Yeah, this is blatantly circular, but, well, if we start out with the assumption that language is composed of these units that affect the pronunciation of sounds and then try to figure out where these units are, then not only do the units we come up with very often match up with what speakers perceive as syllables, but these same units frequently turn out to have very specific rules about what is and isn't allowed in what positions within them. And they also tend to come in handy when trying to figure out how things like the pitch and rhythm of a language work. It might sound like if we're looking at a new language and we don't know where the syllable boundaries are or how sounds change based on syllable boundaries, then we'd have no way to get started. But we can look at any of these characteristics of syllables to try to get some hints as to how to begin. And in addition to that, there's another method of determining syllable boundaries that I think is incredibly useful and takes advantage of one key fact about syllables that everyone agrees on. They never span multiple words. You'll never have a syllable that starts in one word and ends in the next. Because of that, we know that if a sound is at the beginning of a word, it's also at the beginning of a syllable, and if it's at the end of a word, it's at the end of a syllable. We can use this fact to figure out how sounds are pronounced differently depending on their location within a syllable, and once we know that, we can figure out where the syllables are. For instance, if you say the phrase helmet and then say the phrase helmet, you might notice that you're saying them slightly differently. It's not that there's a pause between them, when I said them just now, I started each word right after finishing the last. Rather, I pronounced the m sound slightly differently in one than the other. In helmet, I pronounced it slightly longer and lowered my vellum slightly more, because that's how you pronounce the m sound when it's at the end of a syllable. Now compare these phrases with the word helmet, which has the same sounds in the same order, and you'll find that it's pronounced much closer to helmet than helm it, telling us that the m is at the beginning of a syllable in this word, and that there's a syllable boundary right here. Now, you might have noticed that even though we sort of have a vague understanding of how syllables act and how to tell where they are, we still can't really say what they are, and that's because there still isn't a universally accepted definition for the syllable. This is an area of ongoing research. They seem to play a big part of how we realize particular sounds, so they're probably a big part of how we store words in our heads. But that kind of thing is really difficult to research or prove, so exactly what the role of syllables is in the process of making an idea into a bunch of sound waves is still something we don't really understand. But at least this method of using word boundaries gives us a working algorithm to use to figure out where they are. Good thing everyone always agrees on where word boundaries are, otherwise the application of this idea would get a lot more complicated. Yep, definitely not gonna have to make all a video covering that mess. So put down that shovel face, cause we're swinging in the night, that tells you no.