Syllables in Hebrew, Korean and Japanese
I’m watching some iTunes U podcasts on Elementary Hebrew and in a chapter on Vowels, the presenter makes an interesting point about Hebrew.
He says that Hebrew only has 2 possible syllable constructions:
- Consonant-vowel (Open)
- Consonant-vowel-consonant (Closed)
Although he said at the start of one of the other presentations that there is a word “ab”, which surely is Vowel-consonant. I’m not sure on this.
Going on, and if I’m totally wrong about this then please call me out on it, but it struck me as interesting, thinking back to my study of Japanese, Korean and English.
Japanese
After thinking about Japanese for a while, I still couldn’t get back to such a simple set of rules that he comes up with about Hebrew.
- かたな (ka ta na, sword). Standard Cv pairs that I thought of at first.
- パン (pa n, bread). This has the Japanese ん (n) sound, making a Cvc syllable.
- あか (a ka, red). Now things get interesting, as this is 2 syllables in my mind. The first a being one, and ka being a standard Cv pair.
- あん (a n, red bean paste) is an example of vowel-consonant that is definitely one syllable.
- Finally one that I still can’t get my head around: あおい (aoi, blue). All vowels, sounds like 2 syllables to me but I’m not sure.
So Japanese syllables look something like:
- V — い (i, stomach)
- Cv — か (ka, mosquito)
- Vc — あん (an, red bean paste)
- Vv — あい (ai, love)
- Cvc — パン (pan, bread)
Edit: it seems Japanese phonology focusses on Mora rather than syllables, so each character counts as 1 mora. For example even the っ and ん in the word にっぽん count as morae.
Korean
Swiftly moving on from that quagmire, next is Korean. I’m still new to Korean, but here’s what I know:
- 원 (won, won) Cvc maybe.
- 사과 (sa gua, apple) Cv Cv(v?). Maybe because this is a dipthong the second 2 vowels only count as one.
- 수업 (su eop, lesson). This has something close to a glottal stop at the end, but it seems like Cv Vc to me.
I think Korean is basically the same as Japanese. However it has a greater variety of final consonants used in closed syllables, whereas Japanese only uses ん (n).
Conclusion, or lack of one.
Based on all this, I wonder if the lecturer was just simplifying things in the early lectures and will visit this topic later. I also wonder if there’s a more concrete definition of what makes up a syllable. Some of the vowel-vowel pairs could be dipthongs, but I think I still pronounce them as one syllable.
