How English Works #10
How English Works 10
Syllabic Consonants
Intermediate
In this series, we learn about English grammar differently than usual. There are no charts, no memorization, no confusing rules with millions of exceptions. Instead, we look at interesting aspects of English and how you can understand them. Don't worry if you fully understand. Notice these while you're immersing in English, and it'll all make sense with time.
Hi everybody, my name is Ben and you're watching How English Works. These are not your typical grammar or English lessons. We don't do any drills, there's no charts, and there's definitely not any memorization. My goal is to help you to better understand how English works and how to understand the things that we English speakers do and say. I'm noticing my camera looks a little crooked. Maybe that's better. And today, ooh. And today, I wanna talk about one of my favorite concepts and one of my favorite things about spoken English, which is syllabic consonants. We've talked a little bit about this before, but I wanna go into it so that you can better notice it and hear it and understand it when you come across it in English, because it's actually really common. And it can be a bit weird when you're listening and you feel like things are missing or especially if you're at the point where you're trying to speak, it can be really hard to do. So let's jump into it. First, I feel like I'm, yeah, no, nevermind. First, let's talk about the different words here. So syllabic and consonant. So let's start with the word consonant, the second one. What is a consonant? Well, a consonant is not a vowel, and that's basically the definition. Um, but if we think about our mouths, vowel sounds are more open. They have a flowing sound. You can sing them, right? Ah, yeah. Right. So a, e, i, o, and u are the written vowels, but when you write them out, you often get vowel sounds, right? So if we look at the word sill, right, we have i, sill, ah, So there's, those are our vowel sounds. It's a little different than written vowels. But everything else is a consonant, some kind of blockage in your speaking, right? So anything where there's like something getting in the way, like a shh. Your tongue is getting in the way of the sound. It's coming out sort of as a hissing noise. SH is a consonant. K is a consonant. M is a consonant. Anything that has a blockage of that sound, right? Even L is a consonant because it's in the way of that L. Right? So anything that you can't really sing in that same way is a consonant. Some might have voicing, right? So Z is still a consonant. It's buzzing. Um, and you can feel it buzzing in your throat, but it's not an open vowel sound. He, um, so those are vowels and consonants, right? So, what's a syllable though? Or a syllabic, right? It comes from the word syllable. We've talked about this before for sure. And that's the breaking down of a word into individual chunks with sylla, or syllabic. Consonant, right? Vowel. There's different syllables there, right? One, two, three. That's not a, one, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, et cetera, et cetera. All words, all languages have syllables. It's a fundamental thing that we do, but the way that you make syllables can be different. Most languages, and most of the time, use vowel sounds as the center of a syllable. So if you break down, let's break down this first one here, this syl, right? We have the one sound, which is sy, we have another vowel sound, which is an i, and then we end with an l sound. So we have SIL, that's how you write this in the IPA. And actually we even have the word SIL in English. Yeah, window cells. You can also add another sound in here, right? And make it still, right? That is still, but that is still just one syllable, right? It has more sounds, but it's one syllable. Because most of the time it's based around this individual, what's called the nucleus or core of the syllable, right? So this i is the core of the syllable. Now, what happens with a, so, actually this core is also called syllabic, right? It creates the syllable, right? It's the syllabic sound. Most of the time we use vowels, right? Still, sil, mil, or bil. Right, there's an eh there, that's a vowel sound. However, you don't always have to do that. Sometimes you can have a consonant be that syllabic piece. So, a good example, if you've ever gone to Britain, or a lot of places, you might have seen fish-n-chips. Right, so these are some normal, regular syllables. Fish has f-i-sh, right, so f-i-sh, three sounds, fish. Chips has ch, which is a sort of a combination sound, i-ch. Chips, right? Fish, chips. But what is this n doing? Because there's actually not an un. It's not fish un chips or fish in chips. Although you can say fish in chips. But what is often said is fish n, fish n chips. Fish n chips. Whoa, did you hear that? That's thunder. Thunder is, the thunder is very loud right now. But what we have here is a whole syllable, right? It's a whole separate piece, but there's no vowel sound. Instead, the N is functioning as the root, the core of that syllable. Fish-n-chips. Fish-n-chips. It's not fish-fish-n-fish. You can't even say fish-n. It's just fish-n-chips. Fish-n-chips, right? I'm saying that a lot of times. I should stop now. Another example is when you take the word something, something, and it becomes more like something, right? So I like this example because you actually just say, so, and that's the syllable break, something, right, something. That's the word something, something, so, mm, do it with me, something. Yeah, exactly. It's weird, right? It's weird to think that this entire word gets broken down into something, or can be, not always, right? And that's one thing that's big about this in English, is that there's a lot of times that you don't have to say a syllabic consonant, right? Because this word is and, you could say fish and chips, fish and chips. but in actual like spoken English it's very common to reduce things to the point of just keeping it as the this like this nucleus sound right and so that's why fish and chips It has an N or go, go wind, that's a whole vowel sound. But like the word in can also become an N, right? I'm inside, I'm inside is fine to say like in normal speech. It might be hard to hear because it's I'm inside, like I'm inside. It doesn't really like sound different than I'm inside, but you can totally hear things like that in spoken English where entire like words become just N. Right? So and, in, are there any other words that become just n and in? I'm sure there are, but I can't really think of any off the top of my head. So let's quickly look at the different sounds that can become syllabic, right? Because not everything can be, right? T is never syllabic. Yeah, right, just double checking. T is not a syllabic, it's not possible, right? In English. The ones that are can be an N, like we just saw, an M, an NG kind of, that one's a bit, not as much, right? I wouldn't say that as much. And then an L sound. So I'll make it a capital so you can easily tell. But there's also, I think also some, The Thunder is very strong. I think those are the main ones. This one is the least common of the three and this one is probably the... they're both pretty common actually. Not really sure. Are there any others I'm missing? I don't think so. Let's look at some examples. So we already saw some for N and M. Another good example for M is rhythm, right? You can actually say rhythm, right? So which is R rhythm, like that, which can be pronounced R rhythm. I, th, which is like this, and then m, rhythm. And you sort of get this split there. R, th, m, th, m. You can't say rhythm with like a full a sound, that's totally fine, but you can also hear this is my example. Another great one is words ending in sort of like an l sound, right? So bottle, bottle. Bottle, so bottle is pretty common to hear, especially in American English. Bottle, bottle, which is B-A-D, it's sort of this tapped D sound, a-da, a-da, bottle, and then a full on ul sound, whoops. This is a, marking the whole sound. This is a fancy way of writing sounds, but you're, listen to my voice. It's easier to understand. So this is a bottle, and you can tell that it's a syllabic consonant because when I say dll, dll, my tongue actually doesn't remove itself from the top of my mouth. Bottle, bottle, doesn't, my tongue stays from the d to the ll. So there's no vowel sound, right? I'm not opening it. You can say bottle, bottle, if you want, or you can also hear bottle, or bottle, anything, like there's a lot of different pronunciations of every word in English, but in my accent, bottle is very, very common. Huddle, puddle, there's so many words that end in this sort of gl thing that you might hear, and that's kind of one of the reasons I wanted to bring this concept up, is because this ending is really, really common. Also words like that, common, can become syllabic. I don't think I say it like that. I think I say common, common with a full vowel sound. But you can definitely hear some people say common, common, the common good. There's plenty of different places where you can hear these very weakened sounds. I'm gonna leave it there because I just wanted to sort of give you an overview of this and hopefully explain sort of what's happening where there's this like sound that sounds like it's it's forgotten like there's something missing almost which to us is very normal and so you should also get used to it because it's going to be pretty helpful for you to be able to hear and to produce The weather is crazy. Anyways, that's been everything for this video. I hope that you enjoyed. If you did, make sure to leave a like and a comment below with what you enjoyed, what you learned, and I'll see you again in another episode. Have a good one. Bye.
For email updates, subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.