Counting syllables in "fire" and other words | Hacker News Reader

Counting syllables in "fire" and other words

answers.google.com

67 pointsgourneau20 comments

This is a question from "Google Answers", a website that ran from 2002 through 2006. People were paid a small amount (usually; occasionally the amount would be reasonable) to do research (usually on the internet) and answer arbitrary questions. In general, the quality of the answers was very high.

I taught Singers' Diction in grad school for several years.

Technically, "fire" contains a triphthong, three vowels in a row, and is thus one syllable. In International Phonetic Alphabet, it's [a] then [I] then a schwa, which I can't type in ASCII.

The only other triphthong in English is the one in the word "our" or "hour", which is [a], then [U], then a schwa.

Can you shed any light on "owl"?

Depending on how much emphasis you put on the word, it can range from one to two syllables. If you use it in a sentence ("The owl ate the mouse") spoken at a conversational speed, the sounds that come from your mouth are likely to be indistinguishable from saying the name Al. If you say the word slowly, you'll have an [æ] (the vowel in cat) or an [a] (the first vowel in father), followed by [wl̩] (sounds like a sheep's hair).

This is just a straight up [aU] diphthong, one syllable, in virtually every dictionary you can find. Certainly all the ones that use IPA. Same in my compact OED (the tiny-print one that comes with a magnifying glass).

Wikipedia has three more examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triphthong#Stress_on_the_first_...

It's actually not a triphthong, because the r is not a vowel. Rather, it's a syllabic consonant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant

The IPA represenation is not [ə], but rather [ɹ̩]. (There's a tick under that ɹ).

And, to be fair, your statements are accurate for British dialects of English that don't have syllable final rhotics, but the original article was about American English.

The interpretation of the [aIə] as triphthong or diphthong varies according to one's source. For singers (I stated that my background was from diction as taught to singers), we tend to be taught that it's a triphthong, because for singing or stage diction, it's often desirable to not be saying an American "r" for seconds at a time...not a pleasing sound. The IPA symbol used varies as well, for the same reasons.

Of course, in some places in the South, "fire" has the same pronunciation as "far".

Wow. Google actually listed a support e-mail address at the bottom of the page. I'm floored.

I'm amused that CMU listed two pronunciations but neither was that native Pittsburgh pronunciation, which is the same as 'fur' on a dog.

Similarly, "squirreled" is considered by some to be the longest one-syllable word in English (rhymes with "world").

Do these people pronounce "squirrel" as "squirl"? That seems... odd.

Most Americans I know use the latter, in which the r and l do not have a vowel between the two.

Are you from the southeast US? I've always heard "squih-ruhl". You also mentioned pronouncing "owl" like Al, which doesn't sound right to me either.

I'm guessing these are the same people who pronounce "terrorist" almost the same as "tourist"

Pacific Northwest here. I pronounce "squirrel" as "squirl".

It gets worse. There's a town, "Sequim". The way you know someone isn't from around here is if they pronounce it "See-quim". It's actually pronounced "Squim".

#from http://goo.gl/6U7f3 count syllables with nltk

from nltk.corpus import cmudict

d = cmudict.dict()

syllables = [len(list(y for y in x if y[-1].isdigit())) for x in d["count"]]

Did you read the link?

>CMU's Pronouncing Dictionry (http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict?in=fire), however, indicates two possible pronunciations (F AY ER | F AY R), the first of which seems to indicate a two-syllable word.

I'm surprised at the lack of variety-awareness in these answers. For me, there is a clear distinction between higher and hire.

Isolated, fire is a tripthong. In connected speech, I'd hazard that it is a monopthong.

When you burn someone in TF2, they scream.

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