welcome back to intro linguistics today we're going to do our second phonology lecture today we're going to look at syllables their structure the sonority hierarchy setting up syllables and we're going to take a look at the case example of aspirated k in english so what is a syllable you all have a rough idea of a syllable so in school we're taught there the beat of the sound so happy you clap every time you hear a syllable improvise plod and you have these weird rules where in English if you have two letters together like two peas you make those syllable you separate them improvise you just have to listen to them and you'll figure out where the syllables are some intuition again we see this double P in a plot but we know in linguistics that in happy where we have two peas written there's only one pea sound so you don't say happy pea you say happy you don't say app plot you say a plot so really this written syllable structure doesn't really make any sense and that's the problem with orthography orthography is very bad for talking about syllables it's very bad for teaching kids how to write because for instance thought goes through it there it's English is very bad for a thought Rafi so instead we use IPA so I've written out these words in IPA and we'll show you how to separate syllables so when we specifically separate syllables in IPA we put dots so happy M pro-vice a plot so we see two syllables for happy 3 for M profiles and 2 for applaud now of course is also stress so we can include that so happy the primary stress is on half so we put primary stress there improvise improvise improvise the main stress is at the beginning of the word for M on that syllable improvise you might be saying how do you know that's primary stress so we can force primary stress no use big so what's it saying in improvise I could say improvise improvise that sounds really weird but that is primary stress on pro now let's put primary stress on wise improvise improvise we don't say that when we speak we say improvise so that primary stress is on em what about applaud applaud applaud applaud which sounds better a plot so that plot has primary stress okay so that is syllables in IPA and how we can write them so important part is structure so syllables are kind of complex now I'm going to use the word stream in English spelt like that and in IPA we would write it like this I should use the correct ours of course ours like that don't really feel like it so I won't so we have the onset and the rhyme so we have a syllable this is um this is Sigma this is lowercase Sigma in Greek we use it because it starts with an S same as syllable this breaks into the onset and the rhyme and the rhyme contains the nucleus and the coda the most important part is the nucleus so this is the center vowel so for instance in stream it's the e so this is the vowel of every syllable so usually when we have vowels a vowel will be in its own syllable the diphthong will be in its own syllable so that is like the head of the syllable that is the body lifting it up so then we have everything to the right of the vowel is in the coda so foreign stream it's one syllable so in that syllable through a mating sound is mm so that's where the coda is and the onset is everything before the nucleus so in stream it's still one syllable so in we have the STR and this is all in the onset in some languages you have STR and onset but in English we can so we have the onset STR the nucleus II and the coda mmm so stream so that's syllable structure now we'll do some examples ago so for instance in the word fight we see we have this I here this is the main vowel I so it's part of the nucleus everything to the right of the vowel is in the coda and the nucleus and the coda make up the rhyme and then the onset is everything to the left of the vowel here so in this case we have the or fight the F the so we have a one syllable word fight now what happens when there's two syllables well in the word missing we have this a and we had this it missing so we have two is so we say okay each of these vowels is going to be in nucleus and then we build the rest upon it so again orthography is bad so we don't do it with orthography first we transform it to IPA so here's the IPA we see our nucleus above the two vowels now usually what you do is you look left and you say is it okay to have those letters and our onset in this case we take a look at em so that's okay so we put em in the onset and then from the other nucleus we take a look to the left and we see us is that good at the onset you say yes so we put it in the onset of the second syllable and then with the remaining we just fill up the coda so syllables do require some intuition of the language you're looking at so for instance I wouldn't ask somebody who has just started learning English one year ago and say hey can you build these syllable structures because they probably couldn't do it correctly a hundred percent of the time while if you're an English speaker you kind of have this really nice intuition about how these things work so we wouldn't say miss a we would say myth sing so you can hear this s in the onset of the second syllable so another way is just write it out first and put the syllable marker in your transcription and use that to help you build so those are some of the examples now let's take a look at the Fon Pig Latin in English so Pig Latin occurs in English as most people would tell you when you take the first letter of the word move it to the end of the word and add a to the end so fight becomes ight PHA missing becomes a Seng may but there's a little bit more to that so really what's happening here is if you translate to these syllable structures you take the onset and you get rid of it so you take the onset the very first onset you create a new syllable which goes into a rhyme a nucleus and a coda and another onset and you move the old onset to the new onset so that F in fight becomes F in the second syllable and then your nucleus is just a and the coda is non-existent so this fight becomes active a what about a missing well first we add the third syllable we break it up the nucleus is going to have ay in it and this onset here simply moves over here so this becomes let's make that arrow shorter it gets deleted so it's ink may so that's the process here we take the first onset we create a new syllable at the very end we make its nucleus a and then we move the old first onset into that last syllable as that syllables onset so we have this here so here's my question when we say the word strong and we want to go to Pig Len do we say Trung say or do we say long stray so the idea here is that with English speakers we would without a doubt people who don't know the formal rule would say on straigh now what does this mean this means that the onset in English is real this onset is a real part of syllable structure so we could say okay this is just a theory we don't know for sure but language games and our ability to move this without knowing any formal rules tells us that we know what an onset is we would never say Truong say we would never just move the first sound we have to move the whole onset over so this would follow the same process as above we move the first onset to the onset of their added syllable so people do know about syllable structure in their minds they may not know about it formally but in their minds you know that syllables are broken down into pieces so that's a very cool thing here pig latin is very very cool language games tell us a lot about language because language games require things that you don't normally do in speech but yet you have this intuition of it so that's my tangent I'll get back to video content so next part sonority hierarchy this is very important for syllables because the way syllables are built are based around the sonority hierarchy basically we give five points to different classes obstruents nasals liquids glides and vowels obstruents have one point nasals have two the quiz have three clients have for vowels have five so we're off students these are the consonants s first put good show zu you should bunch those consonants nasals of course mm-hmm liquids are l and r so look and row glides are our semivowels so what you and bowels of course are the vowels so we assign the points well why do we assign the points why do we assign them sonority points so here's turn of terminology vowels are are more so Duras so that's a term you should know sonorous I think that's how you spell it all not handwrite that so you can see it so the further right you go the more sonorous they become syllable structure is based around sonority so let's chart these words so first of all let's remember obstruents nasal liquids glides vowels could remember on leg of AX you could make an anagram if that helps you but over time you'll just get used to it so message that's a nasal so that goes up to - or sorry mmm nasal goes up to - yeah that's a vowel it goes all the way up to five that's a knob Street gets one yeah again that's a vowel goes up and gee that's a knob straight so what do we see here we see that the nucleus here is actually the highest peak and then it looks left to get us on scent or not on scent on set and then it looks right to fill up its coda so let's see if this happens with the word revolution so R is a liquid so that is a three a is a vowel that's a five the abstract vowel liquid is a three o is a vowel obstruent and a vowel mm is a nasal okay revolution four syllables I see four peaks you so I see four nucleuses and what do we do with the nucleus well first we look left and we fill up our onsets so we fill these up and then we look right and we fill up our kotas so we have R a volu tion looks good so what is the message from this when we do syllable structure the onset always builds up to the nucleus and then the nucleus goes down to the coda so we see these pyramid-like structures so for instance if we draw our lines they should always go up and then down so in this case we have three straight lines and then we have a little pyramid here so code is not all syllables have kotas so not all of them will be pyramids but they should always build up and build down you should never build up then down then up again in the same syllable this goes for any language any language every language so this is a universal principle so an already hierarchy so this is a way that we can figure out syllables as well lastly how do we set these up so again how we did the sonority hierarchy before but there's other ways to do this um most important part and the first part if you don't want to do all the sonority hierarchy stuff you don't have any intuition about the language start with the vowels and put nucleuses above those so for instance and revolution that the oh the ooh and the Oh put nucleuses above them and straight up go to the rhyme so we build them up to the rhyme and then we're going to build them up to their own syllables as well so we're going to build them all the way up from the nucleus then what we do is we look left and we say is that okay to put in the onset so row that's okay for the onset in English so we'll put that there look that's okay for the onset in English we'll put that there look that's okay for the onset in English we'll put that there sure that's okay for the onset we'll put that there and in the last part is filling up the coda with everything remaining so that's how we build up syllable structure let's try the word manatee so again we look at the vowels we build them up two syllables so the at the a and the e okay and then we take a look to the left and we say is that a good onset so Matt that's good so we're going to put that in the onset I want to make this look a little bit nicer this time no that is okay as well and to that is also okay okay so that's how you do syllables and you might be wondering hey what do you mean if that's an okay onset you take a look at the next sample okay so we're going to do a quick break to Spanish here and I'll talk about on sets so let's take a word like ski in English so ski we take a look here we start with a nucleus we build up and we say okay a good onset it's good can we put school at the beginning of our syllables and the answer is yes in English is fine let me rewrite this here English will do Spanish over here just so I don't confuse anybody who just jump to the video or just jump to this part okay so Scott is fine for the onset so we have ski now in Spanish um let's start off the same way let's start with the nucleus all the way up to the rhyme of syllable and we say iske and okay onset in Spanish and Spanish pupils will tell you no it's not we can only have this cut in the onset so what happens here well there's nothing left to put in the onset we can't have this cluster in the onset of a syllable so instead what they do is they add this head here so now we have two syllables so we have this new syllable here which takes the air and then this s this fills up the coda position so instead of ski we have a ski and that's because in Spanish they don't like this SK consonant cluster in the onset so when it's not in the onset it has to be pushed back to the coda of another syllable so adding a schwa instead which is how it actually is it's the schwa there they can put that s in the coda of another syllable and they can say ski as a ski or instead of saying special they may say special because they don't like this SK consonant cluster it's the same with SP and st you can probably guess why because kpt all have very similar properties so little tangent there let's take a look at the English example for cup the aspirated K I talked about before how it was in the onset of syllables so if we take a look here aspiration occurs in the onset so for king it's the word King Accord hack and aching we can take a look here and we can say okay so here's the stress and here's the onset so we have stress and onset aspirated the second example we take a look at the onset and the stress okay aspirate it in the third example this K is in the coda so there's no aspiration however this P here has stress and it's in the onset so we aspirate the P okay what about primary stress here is in the onset but there's no stress the stress is on the first syllable so we don't aspirate it so those two conditions for aspiration for K's PS and T's has to be in the onset of a syllable and it needs primary stress so that's the example we did in the last video and we can see it holds with syllable structure as well so that's it four syllables next time we talk about features definitely the most unfun part of phonology but it's needed so I understand some of you may not like it and that's okay it should be fun so if you have any questions please leave them in the comments below I hope to see you in the next video