Re: Hebrew and tradition

Dr. Joel M. Hoffman wrote:
>
> >>All of these types of issues are uncontroversal in almost every other
> >>language. Modern linguists basically agree on what constitutes a
> >>syllable, /
> >
> >They do?
> >
> >Take the Dutch word 'kippen', for example, the plural of 'kip' =
> >'chicken'. For spelling purposes, like hyphenation and determining
> >which phoneme written 'i' represents, it is broken up as 'kip-pen'.
> >But there is no double p (phonetically nor phonemically), and the
> >grammatical structure is 'kip-en', -n being a plural suffix. So what
> >is a syllable.
> >Worse: the word 'kast' has the plural 'kasten'. Morphologically
> >'kast-en', but official spelling rules say it should be hyphenated as
> >'kas-ten'. Weird? Weird! What is a syllable? I don't know.
>
> Yes, linguists agree, and this matter has been discussed extensively.
> Orthographic conventions sometimes mask the syllable structure, but
> that doesn't mean it isn't well understood. (There actually are some
> difficult cases, but not in the data we are discussing.)
>
> Chapter 6 of Prince and Smolensky's _Optimality Theory_ (available
> on-line:
>
> http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/537-0802/537-0802-PRINCE-0-0.PDF
>
> ) is a good place to start for a serious introduction to syllable
> theory. I assume Pinker's book (_The Language Instinct_) mentions it,
> too. Any introduction to phonology will contain good information,
> too.

If you had ever _read_ a book on phonetics or phonology, you'd have
known that there most certainly is not "agree"ment among linguists on
what a syllable is.

"Syllable theory" has nothing to say about what a syllable is, either
acoustically or articulatorily, in the speech-stream.

Astonishingly, the Linguistics Department of the University of Maryland
appears to have granted you a Ph.D. in syntax without requiring you to
demonstrate any knowledge of phonology at all, as was apparent from the
ms. of your book. (I repeat, I have not read the published version but
found a mistake on the first page I opened it to.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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