Talk:Syllabification

Ehi, stop saying nonsense in Italian you can syllabify any word if you follow the rules (they are taught in the very first years of elementary school and revised during the following 3 years. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.203.194.237 (talk • contribs) 13:33, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, you can, and that's exactly what the article said (although it said it for both Italian and Finnish), if you cared to actually read it. I'm restoring it. LjL (talk) 13:43, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

I can see that it's useful to have an article on syllabification, but (at least wrt English) this is mostly about written syllabification. Since the division of speech into syllables is also called syllabification, I feel the title of the article should be changed, or the treatment of syllabification of spoken language within it greatly expanded. RoachPeter (talk) 17:18, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I completely agree. (And within over five years, nobody seems to have disagreed.) --Daniel Bunčić (de wiki · talk · en contrib.) 11:27, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

This article as it stands has incorrect facts about English hyphenation. There are definite rules for breaking words intosyllables for hyphenation in English which dictionaries follow. And these definitely depend on pronunciation. Some of these are:

• Try to break words at morpheme boundaries (inter-face).
• Try to break words between doubled consonants (bat-tle).
• Never separate an English digraph (e.g., th, ch, sh, ph, gh, ng, qu) when pronounced as a single unit (au-thor but out-house).
• Avoid breaking a word before a string of consonants that cannot begin a word in English (jinx-ing and not jin-xing).
• Avoid breaking a word after a short vowel in an accented syllable (rap-id but stu-pid).

And if the above rules leave more than one acceptable break between syllables, use the Maximal Onset Principle:

• If there is a string of consonants between syllables, break this string as far to the left as you can (mon-strous).

There are several problems with these rules. The main problem is that for many words they conflict, and you have to break at least one of them. This is one of the times that dictionaries disagree. The other problem is that sometimes the pronunciation of a word varies. This is another case where dictionaries disagree.There are many cases of words where British and American pronunciations lead to two different hyphenations.And sometimes, there are two different American (or British) pronunciations of a word (e.g. vapid) and some dictionaries choose one pronunciation to determine the hyphenation, while some choose another. I'd edit thearticle, but I worked out these rules by myself, by looking at what dictionaries did, so I don't actually have a source for them. Peterwshor (talk) 16:10, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

while it seems that syllabification in english is not a very important skill for the average folks, other languages may look at it differently. eg in hungarian it carries quite a social stigma if one fails to use it correctly. probably it has to do with its relatively simple rules. (the next syllable always starts with one consonant, except when a wovel is followed by another wovel. notable exception: composite words break up at the connection between their forming-words which can be broken down further using the first rule. any syllable must contain exactly one wovel. consonants marked with 2 letters count as one (not divided). stressed versions of the previously mentioned two-letter consonants are marked by three letters but count as two pieces of two-letter consonants, eg "nny" in "mennyei" breaks up as "meny-nye-i". just in case you want to go into more details on the rules of syllabification in different languages. 80.99.38.199 (talk) 22:05, 29 November 2017 (UTC).

"A space is possible but with zero probability (e.g., syl la ble)." The literal meaning would be, "you can use spaces, but no one does and no one ever will". Tulpabug (talk) 11:11, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

Since syllabication is one of the most prominent features of the American Heritage Dictionary, I'd add information about it and a link to the rules followed for syllabication --Backinstadiums (talk) 20:51, 5 July 2020 (UTC)