 Good morning. Good morning sir. We have been talking about organization of speech sounds and we said we saw yesterday that all speech sounds are organized in a structural unit called syllables. Many languages in India recognize a term called akshara which is almost equivalent to the concept of syllable. All speech sounds are gathered in terms of syllables in any language. And we saw yesterday that a syllable is all the sounds that can be uttered together in one breath pulse, one contraction and expansion of lungs. No matter who you are, no matter how strong or weak you are, how rich or poor you are, men or women, whatever you are, we do not utter two syllables in one breath pulse. For two syllables we need two breath pulses, okay, one, two contractions of and expansions of lungs, okay. We also saw that a syllable necessarily has a vowel. It may or may not have one or more consonants before and after that vowel. Try and draw a syllable diagram please without anything. Just see if you remember it or your notebook. Draw it. Don't look at the board as I am drawing. In many books you will find lower case sigma as a symbol for syllable or in dictionaries sometimes a dot, a full stop mark is used to indicate syllables. So between syllables you will find them, okay. A syllable has onset and rhyme, onset note can be occupied only by consonants. Rhyme again can have a coda but necessarily a nucleus, nucleus note is occupied necessarily by a vowel, coda by consonants, okay. Compare your diagram if you have made a mistake, please change it, make correction, okay. A syllable has principally two branches onset and rhyme, onset note is occupied by consonant, rhyme I am sorry there is mistake in the spelling. I will change it please write it as I have written on the board. It is R I M E not R H Y M E, okay. And rhyme note branches into nucleus and coda you may or may not have a coda in a syllable. You may or may not have an onset in a syllable but if there is a vowel it is a syllable, okay. Usually each vowel makes a syllable usually but sometimes you may have diphthongs. They also make you know a combination of two vowels like I in kite, life or I in now, how, cow though they appear to be two vowels they make one syllable. So monophthongs or diphthongs, okay. You need vowels to make one syllable. Minimally there can be no consonant, maximally there can be any number. You can have three, four consonants in the onset. Similarly minimally there can be no consonants, maximally there can be three, four, five, any number. There are no restrictions or if there are restrictions they are language specific restrictions. In my mother tongue, Maitli which is spoken in Nepal and Bihar, we can have only two consonants in the onset at the most but in Sanskrit in English you can have three consonants in the onset. You can have words beginning with sa, pa, r as in spread, sa, ta, r as in street, in Sanskrit also you can have sa, ta, r as in three, okay, etc. These are, these constraints are language specific. What is universal is the following whether or not there is a consonant in the onset, whether or not there is a consonant in the koda, so long as there is a vowel it does make a syllable, okay. Look at another example from English. You have a word like, you have a word like pine, transcribe it, okay. Here you have one, is this onset or koda? Please try, is this onset or koda? This is onset, is this onset nuclear or koda, nucleus or koda? It is the nucleus, so onset, nucleus and this is the koda. Let us take another word on the screen I have in, how do you transcribe it? In this case, do we have an onset? No, we do not have an onset, none. Nucleus, yes, this is the nucleus and this is the koda. Take another word we have on the screen, we have a word like p as in peanuts. How do you transcribe it? Please transcribe it on your notebook. Do we have an onset here? Yes or no? We have an onset here, this is the onset. Do we have a nucleus here? We have a nucleus here. Do we have a koda here? No, we have no koda here, okay. Let us take another word print, okay. Let us transcribe it, okay. What are these things? Onset nucleus or koda? Onset. You have more than one consonant in the onset. What is this? Onset nucleus or koda? That is the nucleus of the syllable. What are these things? These are the koda, two consonants, you know. So we can, you know this template, the syllable template can now be matched. You can have either no onset, you can have no koda, you can have more than one consonant in the onset, more than one consonant in the koda. These are variables, these can change from word to word, speech to speech, language to language. What is universal is the following, that if there is a vowel, it makes the nucleus of a syllable and almost each vowel constitutes a syllable. Let us analyze their structure further, okay. There can be words, there can be, there can be words with one syllable, you know. The question is are syllables and words coterminous, are they the same thing? Okay, perhaps not. Okay, word is a larger unit, conceptually and structurally both. You can have a word with only one syllable, you can have a word with two syllables, you can have a word with five syllables, you can have a word with any number of syllables. There is no upper limit on how many syllables can there be in a word. And even conceptually, you know, word is a higher unit. Look at the examples I have given you, what is the first word? Cat, what is the first word? Cat, next monkey, next elephant, and next university. Can you draw a tree diagram for these words on your notebook? Take a couple of minutes, for each syllable, for each syllable begin with cat, draw the tree diagram, this kind of diagram and then underneath right what is onset, what is nucleus, what is coda, okay. It does not matter if you make mistakes, you know. I am going to give you the structure there, but you will be able to learn only if you do it now. Draw this diagram first and then you know, draw this diagram. This is very easy yesterday, then you should be able to draw. Can you see your diagram? Now draw a diagram here, what is in this word onset? Correct, lovely. So this is onset, lovely. Can you try that for this and this? Did you get it? Do it for a bigger word? Did you, wonderful, God bless you. Okay, it produces straight, you know, it is pretty mechanical. Even a computer can segment it into different syllables. This now should come here. Oh, sorry. Divisions I have made. The first word cat, look at the slide. Cat, okay. Onset, ca, rhyme has a, enter, where nucleus is a, and coda is monkey. It has two syllables. The first syllable is monk and the second syllable is key. Check, compare your division, syllable division. If you got it right, ticket in the first syllable, you have onset, ma, rhyme has a, which divides in a, which is the nucleus and a, which is the coda. But in the second syllable, key, you have onset and nucleus, but no coda. Is that correct? Yes or no, please? Right. Look at the next word, elephant, the first syllable. What is the first syllable here? A. It has no onset, no coda. But look at the second syllable, lee. It has an onset, it has a nucleus, but does it have a coda? Once again, please listen to me. Okay, look at the second syllable in elephant. What are the syllables in elephant? First is a, second is? Come on, please, don't look scared, lee and third is? Fent. So, in the first syllable, a, do we have an onset? No. Do we have a coda? No. We only have a nucleus. In the second syllable, lee, do we have an onset? Yes. Do we have a nucleus? Yes. Do we have a coda? No. In the third syllable, fent, do we have an onset? Yes. Do we have a nucleus? Yes. Do we have consonants in the coda? Yes. One or more? More. You know, there is nothing else to go by. Okay. This is true of any, any, you know, I have given you words from, monthly. You can still, you know, cut it into syllables. How many syllables are there in the first word? One only. How do you say that? Because it has only one vowel. Okay. How do you say that? Because it has only one vowel. Okay. But look at the second word. Okay. How many syllables are there in it? Two. Okay. Because there are two vowels. We may not be sure, you know, now I am bringing a problem. Look at the second word, monthly word here. You know, there are two consonants next to each other in the middle of the word. You know, pa, enta, hapta. Okay. Now, we do not know a priori. There is, you know, no principle across the word. Okay. Across the board, which will tell you that both pa, enta become the koda or become the consonant or they cut into onset and koda. Okay. Look at the problem. You know, in, in sciences, in knowledge, you know, there is a science of knowledge. Do you know that subject? Do you know the name of that subject, which is known as the science of knowledge? This is called epistemology. Okay. Please write. And in epistemology, the, you know, there is a very important concept of understanding the questions. You know, answers may change. Answers do change. Until yesterday, we believed that the earth was a static and the sun goes round. Okay. Then we believed that the sun is a static and the earth goes round. Now we believe that sun also goes round, earth also goes round. Okay. There are all kinds of circular motions. All right. So, it is important for us to understand questions. Answers may change. Okay. So, look at the question here. The question here is, take a word like this from a language you do not know. You do not know this language. You have found out what it means. It means weak. The question now is, this is, is this onset or coda? Come on, please make an onset. This is onset. Okay. This is the nucleus. This is the nucleus. Does it have a coda? No. No. Now we are left with two consonants here. Do these consonants make the nucleus of the following syllable or the coda of the following syllable or do they cut in between? What is your guess? Okay. This is language specific. You will have to understand very carefully. I am stating a very abstract concept. You know, there can both be the onset of the following syllable if they occur together at the beginning of the word ever in this language. They do not. Say, for example, if you have pa and ra coming, okay. Say, for example, in a word like appropriate in English, do these consonants pa and ra. Do these consonants pa and ra. What is your answer? Listen to the question carefully, please. We have two consonants in the middle of between two vowels. These vowels will make syllables by themselves. No problem. What do we do with these consonants? Do we, do they go as the coda of the first? Do they go as the onset of the second or do we cut them? What is your guess? What is your answer? Okay. Why do you say onset? You see, these are matters of application. These are what in epistemology we call heuristic. What gives you better mileage? What gives you better mileage? So, lot of people say that if these two consonants can also occur at the beginning of the word, then put them together as consonant, okay. But if they do not, let us take another word, harpik, okay. Now, here again we have ra and pa. Do we use it as the onset of the following or the coda of the following? We have two consonants here, two consonants here. What is your answer for this? Here we will have to cut because there is no word in English where ra and pa begin the word, okay. In this case, ra becomes the coda and pa becomes the onset of the following syllable. But if there is a single syllable, look at the screen, look at the slide. If there is a single syllable, one syllable between, sorry, I am extremely sorry, if there is a single consonant, if there is one consonant between two vowels, then it is usually the onset of the following vowel, okay. But if there is a cluster, if there are two consonants between two vowels, three consonants between two vowels, then the principle is these consonants will form the onset of the following syllable if and only if there is a word in that language which begins with these consonants. Otherwise they will divide into onset and coda. You can work it out, check with me and we will do that. So you know syllable structure principles are by a large universal, okay. One vowel gives you one syllable in any language. We saw English, we saw Maitre, you know. We have words which give you monosyllabic word, pal, moment, hapta, week, two syllables, mahina, how many syllables? Three because there are three vowels, mahina, bari, four syllables. Why? Because how many vowels are there? Four vowels are there. So they make clearly four syllables, you know. Some of these principles can be very mechanically applied without any problem and those principles, you know. You can also apply to, say for example, in the fourth word, mahin, bari, na and bar, would they both go as the onset of the following syllable or the coda of the previous or would they be split? What is your answer? They would be split because in this language there is no word that begins with na and bar, okay. Let us continue. Please, you know also look up some books. I have given you references. You will be better able to understand. Do the exercise and if you do not understand me, please come and talk to me. I am going to give you some problems at the end semester examination and I am going to ask you to divide these words into appropriate syllables. There you will have to understand these applications quite carefully. So it is a good idea if you look up some of those books I have mentioned in the course outline handout I gave you in the beginning of this semester, right? Okay, so let us continue. What is the use of the syllable? Syllable is the highest unit in phonology. All speech sounds phonemes, allophones, silence, you know, because silence can also be phonological. It separates silence often, not always, often separates one word from another. So all speech sounds are organized in terms of syllables. As words are organized in phrases, phrases are organized in sentences. Similarly, speech sounds are organized in syllables, okay. And syllable is the highest unit of a structure in the level of phonology. Look at the first sentence. Which language do you think it comes from? I have given you a sentence in transcription. Look at the screen, look at the first line, okay. Which language do you think this sentence comes from? Make a guess. Darkish. Darkish, lovely. Anybody else, please? German, wow. Did you do a course in German? It is English. Who said English, please? Right, clearly say it loud and clear. You are saying like you are going to commit a murder. Say English, okay. Which language does it come from? It comes from English. Look at this. Can you make a guess? What that line is? You may go wrong. Doesn't matter. Can you, can you write it in normal orthography on your notebook? What is the first line? And I promise you I am going to give you these things at the end semester examination as question paper. You will have a sentence in transcription. Please rewrite it in normal orthography, okay. What is the first line? Anyone, please? It doesn't matter if you make mistake. Anyone for trying, I will give you my good wishes. What is it? All I want is rooms somewhere, lovely. The first sentence is, all I want is a room somewhere. I want is a room. This is the first line. I have written them together without gap between words because this is how you and I speak. If you look at the spectrogram of your speech, you will find that there are no gaps between words, okay. How do you split them into syllables? Which is the first syllable in this utterance? Come on now, please. What is the first utterance? All. What is the first syllable? All. What is next? I. Next. Next. Is next. Next. Next. Next. Yeah, actually this is in a standard English. This is it. In India we pronounce it as which is known as standard, you know. In English they write H but they do not pronounce H. In standard English, in non-standard English, you know, as we do in India we say where, what. But in English it is where, what, okay. Once again see the point. The point here is when we speak syllables merge into each other, words merge into each other, okay. Unless you know the language, you do not know, okay. Which word ends where? But you still know syllables because you go by the principle of one vowel makes one. Sometimes you may have confusions about, you know, whether these two actually if you take, unless you are guided by the word, if you are not guided by the word then the first boundary will come here and tau will become the onset of is. So, it will be all I want, tease. That is how you pronounce. That is how you speak. You do not say all I want is when we speak it is like all I want, tease, okay. Because tau tends to become the onset of the following syllable, okay. But look at the work of nature even when we do not know the language we can make the cuts. Look at the second sentence. Can you tell me, can you write it in normal orthography what that sentence is? Far away from the cold night air. Make the cuts, yeah make the cuts please wherever you think it will make an individual syllable. Do it first on your own. Make a mistake. It does not matter. The sentence is what is the sentence? Far away from the cold night air, okay. So split the syllables. Next, what is the next phrase? Can you tell me what this sentence is? Third lots of good chocolate. Then for me to eat, you see nothing that you know absolutely nothing including eating, cycling whatever you know. You know because you have tried you have made mistakes and you have again tried and you have learned. That is true also of learning phonetic transcription, okay. Please, how do you split words here? Lots of chocolates for me to eat, okay. What is the final sentence? Last fourth, okay. It is a wonderful English song, you know. I took these four lines from an English song. I can give you link to that song and you know you can listen to the good music there, okay. What is the fourth line? Lots of cold, making lots of heat, okay. Compare your syllable division. I have for your sake I have given it on this screen. Look at the screen. Compare your own division of words into syllables. See if you got them right. What I want to achieve is for you to recognize syllables in a continuous utterance. You know because in the utterance when we speak we do not necessarily pause with words, okay. Words may merge, sounds may get into one another and the only principle that operates there is phonological principle. Tomorrow if you want to design a software to recognize you know your friend's voice, your enemy's voice, these principles can be at the basic level of the words. That engineering. Did you get it right? Those who got it right please raise your hands. First line, the second line, okay. Very few people. Which means you know you need some practice, okay. Do some practice. Pick up a sentence at random from anywhere from what you hear in the dining hall, what you hear on the courses, a conversation on phone. Take any actually occurring utterance at random. Put it on your notebook and see how you can cut it. It will give you very fine perception into natural language processes. You will be able to see connections and disconnections which you may not have seen before, okay. Let us move on. What are some generalizations? Only some sounds can occur in some order in any position. Are there any rules which sound can be onset, which sound can be coda? These are language specific, you know. Possible onsets. In English for instance, sa-pa-ra, you know, or sa, in English sa-pa-ra, sa-pa-la, sa-pa-ya, etc. can make onset, but not in my mother tongue. We cannot have sa-pa, you know. That is not the acceptable onset. In many other languages as well in Arabic, in English at the end of the word you can have sa-ta-sa as in texts. You can have sa-ka-sa as in asks or sa-pa-sa as in wasps, but it is not necessarily the case. In many south Indian languages, you cannot have three consonants at the end of the word. You have only not even all consonants. You have either the word ends in a vowel or na, la, ma, etc. One or two or three limited number of consonants. So these things are possible onsets, possible coda. These concepts are language specific and there are constraints. Together, these, are you with me? Together these language specific concepts are known as, please write, phonotactics. Can you imagine a word in Telugu which begins with na-ka? Can you imagine a word in Telugu which begins with pa-ra, pra-bandham? So pra is an acceptable onset in Telugu. But na-ka, can you imagine a word in Telugu which begins with na-ka? You can imagine lots of words in Telugu which end in na-ka or na or ka. But there are languages in Africa, swahili. Do you know where swahili is spoken? Swahili is spoken in eastern and central Africa. In swahili, you have lots of words that begin with na-ka, ukrum is a common name. There was a very famous popular president of Kenya called Kruma. I am not too sure of the country now. So these things are, these concepts are language specific and the branch that studies them is phonotactics. You do not have to remember this. I am not going to ask you to define phonotactics. What I am going to ask you to remember is these things that these are language specific. There are constraints. What is true of one? You can do actually a term paper. You can do an assignment. Look at the possible codas in Telugu or Hindi or Malayalam or whatever language you speak. Look at the possible onsets. See what happens to the consonants in between. Do some engineering to recognize, can computer recognize? If you utter, can computer split that utterance into specific words. That will be a great engineering if you can do that. There are softwares which do that now. But even in English where a lot has been done, we do not get more than 80 percent correct results. For Indian languages, some work has happened even at our institute and we get between 70, 75 percent correct results. Words do not have the kind of knowledge yet as you and I have. These are some possible onset clusters in English. You can have words begin with pra, pra, pya, bla, etc. These are some possible codas in English. You can have words ending in rap, you know. Quite often, not always once again. Quite often it is a mirror image. See, possible onset. You can have words beginning with pra in English. Can you give me a word beginning with pra in English? Professor, prayer, promise. They begin with pra. Quite often you have words ending in, quite often you have words ending in rap. Can you give me a word in English? Sharp, harp, warp, garb or ta, dart, heart. Quite often these things go in natural languages as mirror image. If it is a, b at the beginning of the word, then at the end of the word what is it likely to be? B, a. If it is a, b, if it is a, b at the beginning of the word, then at the end of the word what is it likely to be? B, n, a. But there are no universal rules. These are possibilities, likely. That is why I said possible onset, you know. This is an empirical decision. You look at the data and you decide that it is possible. It is not possible. But look at the patterns in natural languages. Quite often onset and codas make mirror images of each other. Once again, what am I doing? I am trying to draw your attention to the systematic nature of language. Even in tiny things, a single part of a word, you can see there is such a lot of grammar. There is such a lot of principles at work and you and I without being aware, no mother, no father, no professor sat down with you and told you, today I am going to teach you all the onsets in English. Did they? Yes or no? No. And yet, we know. We can recognize. What is the use of a, you know, a concept like syllables? Many phenomena, many things, allusion, deletion, you know. We said there are four kinds of phonological phenomena. Do you remember? What are those we said? Phonological phenomena can be insertion of sound, loss of sound, gain of sound or loss of feature, gain of features. All of these phenomena can be better described, better explained in terms of syllable structures. Say for instance, you can say short vowels can be lost. Look at the screen. You can say short vowels can be lost after a stressed syllable. For example, I gave you the example the other day. Look at the word D-E-V-E-L-O-P in many Indian, many non-standard varieties and you know, linguistics and any part of linguistic does not have to do with prestige language, non-prestige languages. We are talking about language in use and we can make generalizations, right? So, if somebody asks you, if somebody asks you, what happened to the vowel here? Where did it go? Why is it not visible here? This is a stress. The rule is very simple. In many languages, a weak vowel, a short vowel is lost after a stressed syllable. This is a stress. Immediately here, this has been lost. This has been deleted. So, some of these phenomena, some of these phonological concepts of the loss and gain of sounds, of the loss and gain of features can be better explained in terms of syllables or when you want to say why S-P-R-A-Y? is pronounced as S-P-R-A-Y in some languages. This is the answer. They have a difficult onset, not permitted in that language. When you bring a foreign word into that language with foreign kinds of onset, then the language reorganizes itself. We do not often and always know that a word and syllable are coterminous. You may hear nitrate. Nitrate can be either of the two. It can be either nitrate or it can be a chemical called nitrate. Similarly, when in continuous speech, it may be a name, but in real words, it can be a word, but an aim or a name. The point is words merge in continuous speech and it is only in through the higher level knowledge, knowledge of word that we recognize these things. I will strongly advise you to do some transcription of real life utterance. See how it works and gain some insight into the subject. At the end semester examination, I am going to give you some exercises of this kind. Thank you. Have a good day.