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Syllabic consonants
The word ‘con-sonant’ means sounding together, and consonants don’t normally occur on their own, but only
form syllables in combination with vowels (see ‘Syllables’ on page 20). However, / 11,1 r/, /m / and / n/ can form
syllables without vowels: see the examples of syllabic /1 / — ‘ankle’ and ‘angle’ - on page 13.
Such syllabic consonants are conventionally written with a small vertical mark under the consonant symbol. Other
examples include:
random /'raendm/ syllabic/m/
button /' bAtn/ syllabic/n/
Hungary /'hAqgri/ syllabic/r/
(The name of the country can be - but is not always - pronounced like this, in contrast to the word ‘hungry’.)
Such words can also be pronounced with a vowel sound (‘schwa’ - see below) plus a non-syllabic consonant:
simple /'simpal/
random /'raendam/
button /' bAtan/
Hungary /'hArjgari/
Consonant sounds can even occur completely on their own. For example:
shhh! /// is a way of telling someone to be quiet.
Mmm /m / can express hesitation, agreement, thoughtfulness, etc.
A description of how the sounds of a language are produced, and how they are related to each other, is inevitably rather technical, and the terminology may seem forbidding if you aren’t familiar with it already.
Source: Marks, J. and Bowen, T. (nd). The Book of Pronunciation Proposals for a practical pedagogy. Delta Teacher Development Series.
It has to be recognised that syllabic consonants are a problem: they are phonologically different from their non-syllabic counterparts. How do we account for the following minimal pairs?
Syllabic
'coddling' kndlrn
'Hungary' hAIJgi
Non-syllabic
'codling' kndlnj
'hungry' hAIJgri
One possibility is to add new consonant phonemes to our list. We could invent the phonemes [, r, n, etc. The distribution of these consonants would be rather limited, but the main problem would be fitting them into our pattern of syllable structure. For a word like 'button' bxtn or 'bottle' bot], it would be necessary to add 1)., l to the first post-final set; the argument would be extended to include the r in 'Hungary'. But if these consonants now form part of a syllable-final consonant cluster, how do we account for the fact that English speakers hear the consonants as extra syllables? The question might be answered by saying that the new phonemes are to be classed as vowels. Another possibility is to set up a phoneme that we might name syllabicity, symbolised with the mark ,. Then the word 'codling' would consist of the following six phonemes: k - o - d -1- 1 - IJ, while the word 'coddling' would consist of the following seven phonemes: k - o - d -1 and simultaneously , - 1 - IJ. This is superficially an attractive theory, but the proposed phoneme is nothing like the other phonemes we have identified up to this point - putting it simply, the syllabic mark doesn't have any sound.
Some phonologists maintain that a syllabic consonant is really a case of a vowel and a consonant that have become combined. Let us suppose that the vowel is ;:,. We could then say that, for example, 'Hungary' is phonemically hAIJQ;)ri while 'hungry' is hxnqri; it would then be necessary to say that the ;} vowel phoneme in the phonemic representation is not pronounced as a vowel, but instead causes the following consonant to become syllabic.
This is an example of the abstract view of phonology where the way a word is represented phonologically may be significantly different from the actual sequence of sounds heard, so that the phonetic and the phonemic levels are quite widely separated.
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