Asyllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence ofspeech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as anucleus (most often avowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (margins, which are most oftenconsonants). Inphonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" ofwords.[1] They can influence therhythm of a language, itsprosody, itspoetic metre; properties such asstress,tone andreduplication operate on syllables and their parts.[2] Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the wordignite is made of two syllables:ig andnite. Most languages of the world use relatively simple syllable structures that often alternate between vowels and consonants.[3]
Despite being present in virtually all human languages, syllables still have no precise definition that is valid for all known languages.[2] A common criterion for finding syllable boundaries is native speaker intuition, but individuals sometimes disagree on them.[4]
A word that consists of a single syllable (likeEnglishdog) is called amonosyllable (and is said to bemonosyllabic). Similar terms includedisyllable (anddisyllabic; alsobisyllable andbisyllabic) for a word of two syllables;trisyllable (andtrisyllabic) for a word of three syllables; andpolysyllable (andpolysyllabic), which may refer either to a word of more than three syllables or to any word of more than one syllable.
Syllable is anAnglo-Norman variation ofOld Frenchsillabe, fromLatinsyllaba, fromKoine Greekσυλλαβήsyllabḗ (Ancient Greek pronunciation:[sylːabɛ̌ː]).συλλαβή means "the taken together", referring to letters that are taken together to make a single sound.[6]
συλλαβή is averbal noun from the verbσυλλαμβάνωsyllambánō, a compound of the prepositionσύνsýn "with" and the verbλαμβάνωlambánō "take".[7] The noun uses therootλαβ-, which appears in theaorist tense; thepresent tense stemλαμβάν- is formed by adding anasal infix⟨μ⟩⟨m⟩ before theβb and asuffix-αν-an at the end.[8]
In theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the fullstop ⟨.⟩ marks syllable breaks, as in the word "astronomical" ⟨/ˌæs.trə.ˈnɒm.ɪk.əl/⟩.
In practice, however, IPA transcription is typically divided into words by spaces, and often these spaces are also understood to be syllable breaks. In addition, the stress mark ⟨ˈ⟩ is placed immediately before a stressed syllable, and when the stressed syllable is in the middle of a word, in practice, the stress mark also marks a syllable break, for example in the word "understood" ⟨/ʌndərˈstʊd/⟩ (though the syllable boundary may still be explicitly marked with a full stop,[9] e.g. ⟨/ʌn.dər.ˈstʊd/⟩).
When a word space comes in the middle of a syllable (that is, when a syllable spans words), a tie bar ⟨‿⟩ can be used forliaison, as in the French combinationles amis ⟨/lɛ.z‿a.mi/⟩. The liaison tie is also used to join lexical words intophonological words, for examplehot dog ⟨/ˈhɒt‿dɒɡ/⟩.
A Greek sigma,⟨σ⟩, is used as awild card for 'syllable', and a dollar/peso sign,⟨$⟩, marks a syllable boundary where the usual fullstop might be misunderstood. For example,⟨σσ⟩ is a pair of syllables, and⟨V$⟩ is a syllable-final vowel.
Coda (κ): A consonant or consonant cluster, optional in some languages, highly restricted or prohibited in others
The syllable is usually considered right-branching, i.e. nucleus and coda are grouped together as a "rime" and are only distinguished at the second level.
Thenucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable.[10] Theonset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and thecoda (literally 'tail') is the sound or sounds that follow the nucleus. They are sometimes collectively known as theshell. The termrime covers the nucleus plus coda. In the one-syllable English wordcat, the nucleus isa (the sound that can be shouted or sung on its own), the onsetc, the codat, and the rimeat. This syllable can be abstracted as aconsonant-vowel-consonant syllable, abbreviatedCVC. Languages vary greatly in the restrictions on the sounds making up the onset, nucleus and coda of a syllable, according to what is termed a language'sphonotactics.
Although every syllable has supra-segmental features, these are usually ignored if not semantically relevant, e.g. intonal languages.
In the syllable structure ofSinitic languages, the onset is replaced with an initial, and a semivowel or liquid forms another segment, called the medial. These four segments are grouped into two slightly different components:[example needed]
Tone⟨τ⟩: May be carried by the syllable as a whole or by the rime
In many languages of theMainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, such asChinese, the syllable structure is expanded to include an additional, optionalmedial segment located between the onset (often termed theinitial in this context) and the rime. The medial is normally asemivowel, butreconstructions of Old Chinese generally includeliquid medials (/r/ in modern reconstructions,/l/ in older versions), and many reconstructions ofMiddle Chinese include a medial contrast between/i/ and/j/, where the/i/ functions phonologically as a glide rather than as part of the nucleus. In addition, many reconstructions of both Old and Middle Chinese include complex medials such as/rj/,/ji/,/jw/ and/jwi/. The medial groups phonologically with the rime rather than the onset, and the combination of medial and rime is collectively known as thefinal.
Some linguists, especially when discussing the modern Chinese varieties, use the terms "final" and "rime" interchangeably. Inhistorical Chinese phonology, however, the distinction between "final" (including the medial) and "rime" (not including the medial) is important in understanding therime dictionaries andrime tables that form the primary sources forMiddle Chinese, and as a result most authors distinguish the two according to the above definition.
In some theories of phonology, syllable structures are displayed astree diagrams (similar to the trees found in some types of syntax). Not all phonologists agree that syllables have internal structure; in fact, some phonologists doubt the existence of the syllable as a theoretical entity.[13]
There are many arguments for a hierarchical relationship, rather than a linear one, between the syllable constituents. One hierarchical model groups the syllable nucleus and coda into an intermediate level, therime. The hierarchical model accounts for the role that thenucleus+coda constituent plays inverse (i.e.,rhyming words such ascat andbat are formed by matching both the nucleus and coda, or the entire rime), and for thedistinction between heavy and light syllables, which plays a role in phonological processes such as, for example,sound change inOld Englishscipu andwordu, where in a process called high vowel deletion (HVD), the nominative/accusative plural of single light-syllable roots (like "*scip-") got a "u" ending in OE, whereas heavy syllable roots (like "*word-") would not, giving "scip-u" but "word-∅".[14][15][16]
In some traditional descriptions of certain languages such asCree andOjibwe, the syllable is considered left-branching, i.e. onset and nucleus group below a higher-level unit, called a "body" or "core". This contrasts with the coda.
Therime orrhyme of a syllable consists of anucleus and an optionalcoda. It is the part of the syllable used in mostpoetic rhymes, and the part that is lengthened or stressed when a person elongates or stresses a word in speech.
The rime is usually the portion of a syllable from the firstvowel to the end. For example,/æt/ is the rime of all of the wordsat,sat, andflat. However, the nucleus does not necessarily need to be a vowel in some languages, such as English. For instance, the rime of the second syllables of the wordsbottle andfiddle is just/l/, aliquid consonant.
Just as the rime branches into the nucleus and coda, the nucleus and coda may each branch into multiplephonemes. The limit for the number of phonemes which may be contained in each varies by language. For example,Japanese and mostSino-Tibetan languages do not have consonant clusters at the beginning or end of syllables, whereas many Eastern European languages can have more than two consonants at the beginning or end of the syllable. In English, the onset may have up to three consonants, and the coda four.[17]
Rime andrhyme are variants of the same word, but the rarer formrime is sometimes used to mean specificallysyllable rime to differentiate it from the concept of poeticrhyme. This distinction is not made by some linguists and does not appear in most dictionaries.
Examples C = consonant, V = vowel, optional components are in parentheses.
Aheavy syllable is generally one with abranching rime, i.e. it is either aclosed syllable that ends in a consonant, or a syllable with abranching nucleus, i.e. a long vowel ordiphthong. The name is a metaphor, based on the nucleus or coda having lines that branch in a tree diagram.
In some languages, heavy syllables include both VV (branching nucleus) and VC (branching rime) syllables, contrasted with V, which is alight syllable.In other languages, only VV syllables are considered heavy, while both VC and V syllables are light.Some languages distinguish a third type ofsuperheavy syllable, which consists of VVC syllables (with both a branching nucleus and rime) or VCC syllables (with a coda consisting of two or more consonants) or both.
Inmoraic theory, heavy syllables are said to have two moras, while light syllables are said to have one and superheavy syllables are said to have three.Japanese phonology is generally described this way.
Many languages forbid superheavy syllables, while a significant number forbid any heavy syllable. Some languages strive for constant syllable weight; for example, in stressed, non-final syllables inItalian, short vowels co-occur with closed syllables while long vowels co-occur with open syllables, so that all such syllables are heavy (not light or superheavy).
The difference between heavy and light frequently determines which syllables receivestress – this is the case inLatin andArabic, for example. The system ofpoetic meter in many classical languages, such asClassical Greek,Classical Latin,Old Tamil andSanskrit, is based on syllable weight rather than stress (so-calledquantitative rhythm orquantitative meter).
Syllabification is the separation of a word into syllables, whether spoken or written. In most languages, the actually spoken syllables are the basis of syllabification in writing too. Due to the very weak correspondence between sounds and letters in the spelling of modern English, for example, written syllabification in English has to be based mostly on etymological i.e. morphological instead of phonetic principles. English written syllables therefore do not correspond to the actually spoken syllables of the living language.
Phonotactic rules determine which sounds are allowed or disallowed in each part of the syllable.English allows very complicated syllables; syllables may begin with up to three consonants (as instrength), and occasionally end with as many as four[17] (as inangsts, pronounced [æŋsts]). Many other languages are much more restricted;Japanese, for example, only allows/ɴ/ and achroneme in a coda, and theoretically has no consonant clusters at all, as the onset is composed of at most one consonant.[18]
The linking of a word-final consonant to a vowel beginning the word immediately following it forms a regular part of the phonetics of some languages, including Spanish, Hungarian, and Turkish. Thus, in Spanish, the phraselos hombres ('the men') is pronounced[loˈsom.bɾes], Hungarianaz ember ('the human') as[ɒˈzɛm.bɛr], and Turkishnefret ettim ('I hated it') as[nefˈɾe.tet.tim]. In Italian, a final[j] sound can be moved to the next syllable in enchainement, sometimes with a gemination: e.g.,non ne ho mai avuti ('I've never had any of them') is broken into syllables as[non.neˈɔ.ma.jaˈvuːti] andio ci vado e lei anche ('I go there and she does as well') is realized as[jo.tʃiˈvaːdo.e.lɛjˈjaŋ.ke]. A related phenomenon, called consonant mutation, is found in the Celtic languages like Irish and Welsh, whereby unwritten (but historical) final consonants affect the initial consonant of the following word.
There can be disagreement about the location of some divisions between syllables in spoken language. The problems of dealing with such cases have been most commonly discussed with relation to English. In the case of a word such ashurry, the division may be/hʌr.i/ or/hʌ.ri/, neither of which seems a satisfactory analysis for anon-rhotic accent such as RP (British English):/hʌr.i/ results in a syllable-final/r/, which is not normally found, while/hʌ.ri/ gives a syllable-final short stressed vowel, which is also non-occurring. Arguments can be made in favour of one solution or the other: A general rule has been proposed that states that "Subject to certain conditions ..., consonants are syllabified with the more strongly stressed of two flanking syllables",[19] while many other phonologists prefer to divide syllables with the consonant or consonants attached to the following syllable wherever possible. However, an alternative that has received some support is to treat an intervocalic consonant asambisyllabic, i.e. belonging both to the preceding and to the following syllable:/hʌṛi/. This is discussed in more detail inEnglish phonology § Phonotactics.
Theonset (also known asanlaut) is the consonant sound or sounds at the beginning of a syllable, occurring before thenucleus. Most syllables have an onset. Syllables without an onset may be said to have anempty orzero onset – that is, nothing where the onset would be.
Some languages restrict onsets to be only a single consonant, while others allow multiconsonant onsets according to various rules. For example, in English, onsets such aspr-,pl- andtr- are possible buttl- is not, andsk- is possible butks- is not. InGreek, however, bothks- andtl- are possible onsets, while contrarily inClassical Arabic no multiconsonant onsets are allowed at all.
Onset clusters often follow thesonority principle, that is, onsets with increasing sonority (/kl/) are usually preferred to ones with a plateau (/ll/) and even stronger preferred to decreasing sonority (/lk/); however, many languages have counterexamples to this tendency.[20]
Some languages forbidnull onsets. In these languages, words beginning in a vowel, like the English wordat, are impossible.
This is less strange than it may appear at first, as most such languages allow syllables to begin with a phonemicglottal stop (the sound in the middle of Englishuh-oh or, in some dialects, the double T inbutton, represented in theIPA as/ʔ/). In English, a word that begins with a vowel may be pronounced with anepenthetic glottal stop when following a pause, though the glottal stop may not be aphoneme in the language.
Few languages make a phonemic distinction between a word beginning with a vowel and a word beginning with a glottal stop followed by a vowel, since the distinction will generally only be audible following another word. However,Maltese and somePolynesian languages do make such a distinction, as inHawaiian/ahi/ ('fire') and/ʔahi/ ←/kahi/ ('tuna') and Maltese/∅/ ←Arabic/h/ and Maltese/k~ʔ/ ← Arabic/q/.
Ashkenazi andSephardi Hebrew may commonly ignoreא,ה andע, and Arabic forbid empty onsets. The namesIsrael,Abel,Abraham,Omar,Abdullah, andIraq appear not to have onsets in the first syllable, but in the original Hebrew and Arabic forms they actually begin with various consonants: the semivowel/j/ inיִשְׂרָאֵלyisra'él, the glottal fricative in/h/הֶבֶלheḇel, the glottal stop/ʔ/ inאַבְרָהָם'aḇrāhām, or the pharyngeal fricative/ʕ/ inعُمَرʿumar,عَبْدُ ٱللّٰʿabdu llāh, andعِرَاقʿirāq. Conversely, theArrernte language of central Australia may prohibit onsets altogether; if so, all syllables have theunderlying shape VC(C).[21]
The difference between a syllable with a null onset and one beginning with a glottal stop is often purely a difference ofphonological analysis, rather than the actual pronunciation of the syllable. In some cases, the pronunciation of a (putatively) vowel-initial word when following another word – particularly, whether or not a glottal stop is inserted – indicates whether the word should be considered to have a null onset. For example, manyRomance languages such asSpanish never insert such a glottal stop, whileEnglish does so only some of the time, depending on factors such as conversation speed; in both cases, this suggests that the words in question are truly vowel-initial.
But there are exceptions here, too. For example, standardGerman (excluding many southern accents) andArabic both require that a glottal stop be inserted between a word and a following, putatively vowel-initial word. Yet such words are perceived to begin with a vowel in German but a glottal stop in Arabic. The reason for this has to do with other properties of the two languages. For example, a glottal stop does not occur in other situations in German, e.g. before a consonant or at the end of word. On the other hand, in Arabic, not only does a glottal stop occur in such situations (e.g. Classical/saʔala/ "he asked",/raʔj/ "opinion",/dˤawʔ/ "light"), but it occurs in alternations that are clearly indicative of its phonemic status (cf. Classical/kaːtib/ "writer" vs. /maktuːb/ "written",/ʔaːkil/ "eater" vs./maʔkuːl/ "eaten"). In other words, while the glottal stop is predictable in German (inserted only if a stressed syllable would otherwise begin with a vowel),[22] the same sound is a regular consonantal phoneme in Arabic. The status of this consonant in the respective writing systems corresponds to this difference: there is no reflex of the glottal stop inGerman orthography, but there is a letter in the Arabic alphabet (Hamza (ء)).
The writing system of a language may not correspond with the phonological analysis of the language in terms of its handling of (potentially) null onsets. For example, in some languages written in theLatin alphabet, an initial glottal stop is left unwritten (see the German example); on the other hand, some languages written using non-Latin alphabets such asabjads andabugidas have a specialzero consonant to represent a null onset. As an example, inHangul, the alphabet of theKorean language, a null onset is represented with ㅇ at the left or top section of agrapheme, as in역 "station", pronouncedyeok, where thediphthongyeo is the nucleus andk is the coda.
Thenucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable. Generally, every syllable requires a nucleus (sometimes called thepeak), and the minimal syllable consists only of a nucleus, as in the English words "eye" or "owe". The syllable nucleus is usually a vowel, in the form of amonophthong,diphthong, ortriphthong, but sometimes is asyllabic consonant.
It has been suggested that if a language allows a type of consonants to occur in syllable nucleus, it will also allow all the consonant types that are higher insonority, that is, a language with syllabic fricatives would necessarily also have syllabic nasals, and that syllabic obstruents will be much more rare than liquids; both statements have been shown to be false.[23]
In mostGermanic languages,lax vowels can occur only in closed syllables. Therefore, these vowels are also calledchecked vowels, as opposed to the tense vowels that are calledfree vowels because they can occur even in open syllables.
Some languages allowobstruents to occur in the syllable nucleus without any intervening vowel orsonorant.[10] The most common syllabic consonants are sonorants like[l],[r],[m],[n] or[ŋ], as in Englishbottle or inSlovak krv [krv].[10] However, English allows syllabic obstruents in a few para-verbalonomatopoeic utterances such asshh (used to command silence) andpsst (used to attract attention). All of these have been analyzed as phonemically syllabic. Obstruent-only syllables also occur phonetically in some prosodic situations when unstressed vowels elide between obstruents, as inpotato[pʰˈteɪɾəʊ] andtoday[tʰˈdeɪ], which do not change in their number of syllables despite losing a syllabic nucleus.
A few languages have so-calledsyllabic fricatives, also known asfricative vowels, at the phonemic level. (In the context ofChinese phonology, the related but non-synonymous termapical vowel is commonly used.)Mandarin Chinese allows such sounds in at least some of its dialects, for example thepinyin syllablessī shī rī, usually pronounced[sź̩ʂʐ̩́ʐʐ̩́], respectively. Though, like the nucleus of rhotic Englishchurch, there is debate over whether these nuclei are consonants or vowels.
Languages of the northwest coast of North America, includingSalishan,Wakashan andChinookan languages, allowstop consonants andvoiceless fricatives as syllables at the phonemic level, in even the most careful enunciation. An example is Chinook[ɬtʰpʰt͡ʃʰkʰtʰ] 'those two women are coming this way out of the water'. Syllabicobstruents used to be considered very rare, but surveys have shown that they are relatively common and might even be more common than syllabicliqids.[24]
[xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬɬs] 'he had in his possession a bunchberry plant'[25]
[sxs] 'seal blubber'
In Bagemihl's survey of previous analyses, he finds that the Bella Coola word/t͡sʼktskʷt͡sʼ/ 'he arrived' would have been parsed into 0, 2, 3, 5, or 6 syllables depending on which analysis is used. One analysis would consider all vowel and consonant segments as syllable nuclei, another would consider only a small subset (fricatives orsibilants) as nuclei candidates, and another would simply deny the existence of syllables completely. However, when working with recordings rather than transcriptions, the syllables can be obvious in such languages, and native speakers have strong intuitions as to what the syllables are.
Thecoda (also known asauslaut) comprises theconsonant sounds of a syllable that follow thenucleus. The sequence of nucleus and coda is called arime. Some syllables consist of only a nucleus, only an onset and a nucleus with no coda, or only a nucleus and coda with no onset.
Thephonotactics of many languages forbid syllable codas. Examples areSwahili andHawaiian. In others, codas are restricted to a small subset of the consonants that appear in onset position. At a phonemic level inJapanese, for example, a coda may only be a nasal (homorganic with any following consonant) or, in the middle of a word,gemination of the following consonant. (On a phonetic level, other codas occur due to elision of /i/ and /u/.) In other languages, nearly any consonant allowed as an onset is also allowed in the coda, evenclusters of consonants. In English, for example, all onset consonants except/h/ are allowed as syllable codas.
If the coda consists of a consonant cluster, the sonority typically decreases from first to last, as in the English wordhelp. This is called thesonority hierarchy (or sonority scale).[30] English onset and coda clusters are therefore different. The onset/str/ instrengths does not appear as a coda in any English word. However, some clusters do occur as both onsets and codas, such as/st/ instardust. The sonority hierarchy is more strict in some languages and less strict in others.
"Checked syllable" redirects here. For checked syllables in Chinese, seeChecked tone.
A coda-less syllable of the form V, CV, CCV, etc. (V = vowel, C = consonant) is called anopen syllable orfree syllable, while a syllable that has a coda (VC, CVC, CVCC, etc.) is called aclosed syllable orchecked syllable. They have nothing to do withopen andclose vowels, but are defined according to the phoneme that ends the syllable: a vowel (open syllable) or a consonant (closed syllable). Almost all languages allow open syllables, but some, such asHawaiian, do not have closed syllables.
When a syllable is not the last syllable in a word, the nucleus normally must be followed by two consonants in order for the syllable to be closed. This is because a single following consonant is typically considered the onset of the following syllable. For example, Spanishcasar ("to marry") is composed of an open syllable followed by a closed syllable (ca-sar), whereascansar "to get tired" is composed of two closed syllables (can-sar). When ageminate (double) consonant occurs, the syllable boundary occurs in the middle, e.g. Italianpanna "cream" (pan-na); cf. Italianpane "bread" (pa-ne).
English words may consist of a single closed syllable, with nucleus denoted by ν, and coda denoted by κ:
in: ν =/ɪ/, κ =/n/
cup: ν =/ʌ/, κ =/p/
tall: ν =/ɔː/, κ =/l/
milk: ν =/ɪ/, κ =/lk/
tints: ν =/ɪ/, κ =/nts/
fifths: ν =/ɪ/, κ =/fθs/
sixths: ν =/ɪ/, κ =/ksθs/
twelfths: ν =/ɛ/, κ =/lfθs/
strengths: ν =/ɛ/, κ =/ŋθs/
English words may also consist of a single open syllable, ending in a nucleus, without a coda:
The domain ofsuprasegmental features is a syllable (or some larger unit), but not a specific sound. That is to say, these features may affect more than a single segment, and possibly all segments of a syllable:
Sometimessyllable length is also counted as a suprasegmental feature; for example, in some Germanic languages, long vowels may only exist with short consonants and vice versa. However, syllables can be analyzed as compositions of long and short phonemes, as in Finnish and Japanese, where consonant gemination and vowel length are independent.
In most languages, thepitch orpitch contour in which a syllable is pronounced conveys shades of meaning such as emphasis or surprise, or distinguishes a statement from a question. In tonal languages, however, the pitch affects the basic lexical meaning (e.g. "cat" vs. "dog") or grammatical meaning (e.g. past vs. present). In some languages, only the pitch itself (e.g. high vs. low) has this effect, while in others, especially East Asian languages such asChinese,Thai orVietnamese, the shape or contour (e.g. level vs. rising vs. falling) also needs to be distinguished.
Syllable structure often interacts with stress or pitch accent. InLatin, for example, stress is regularly determined bysyllable weight, a syllable counting as heavy if it has at least one of the following:
In each case, the syllable is considered to have twomorae.
The first syllable of a word is theinitial syllable and the last syllable is thefinal syllable.
In languages accented on one of the last three syllables, the last syllable is called theultima, the next-to-last is called thepenult, and the third syllable from the end is called the antepenult. These terms come from Latinultima "last",paenultima "almost last", andantepaenultima "before almost last".
InAncient Greek, there are threeaccent marks (acute, circumflex, and grave), and terms were used to describe words based on the position and type of accent. Some of these terms are used in the description of other languages.
CV is purported to be the universal syllable type that is found in all languages of the world, although two Australian languages,Arrernte and the Oykangand dialect ofKunjen, are possible exceptions.[31] CV is the first syllable type to beacquired by children, and if a language has only one type of a syllable, it is alwaysCV (e. g.Hawaiian andHua).[32]
Several assymetries in onset and coda have been identified. All languages have syllables with onsets, but about 12.6% of languages inWALS do not allow codas.[33] The list of consonants allowed in the coda is usually smaller than the ones allowed in the onset (e. g. in Northern Germany,coda cannot have voiced consonants).[33] All combinations of onset and nucleus are usually allowed, but the coda consonant is sometimes restricted by the nucleus.[33]
Consonant clusters are more typical in onsets than in codas.[34]
Complex syllables often occur as a result of morphological processes (e. g. the English word "texts" has an uncommon coda /kst-s/ afterpluralisation).[24] Some models of the syllable even exclude morphologically complex syllables from their analysis.[24] At the same time, these clusters are acquired earlier byL1 speakers than the ones arising within a single morpheme, and are less reduced.[35]
^For discussion of the theoretical existence of the syllable see"CUNY Conference on the Syllable".CUNY Phonology Forum. CUNY Graduate Center. Archived fromthe original on 23 September 2015. Retrieved21 June 2022.
^Pellard, Thomas (2010). "Ōgami (Miyako Ryukyuan)". In Shimoji, Michinori (ed.).An introduction to Ryukyuan languages(PDF). Fuchū, Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. pp. 113–166.ISBN978-4-86337-072-2. Retrieved21 June 2022.HALhal-00529598
Dell, François; Elmedlaoui, Mohamed (1985). "Syllabic consonants and syllabification in Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber".Journal of African Languages and Linguistics.7 (2):105–130.doi:10.1515/jall.1985.7.2.105.S2CID29304770.
Dell, François; Elmedlaoui, Mohamed (1988). "Syllabic consonants in Berber: Some new evidence".Journal of African Languages and Linguistics.10:1–17.doi:10.1515/jall.1988.10.1.1.S2CID144470527.
Sloan, Kerry (1988). "Bare-Consonant Reduplication: Implications for a Prosodic Theory of Reduplication". In Borer, Hagit (ed.).The Proceedings of the Seventh West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. WCCFL 7. Irvine, CA: University of Chicago Press. pp. 319–330.ISBN9780937073407.
