how to divide prodigious into syllables?
OALD: pro•di•gi•ous
dictionary.com: pro•di•gious
my questions are:
1.The “di” here sounds like “dig”, why both dictionaries put a dot behind “di” instead of behind “digi”?
2. In a hand-written article, can’t anyone mis-read “prodi- gious” as prodye- gious”? Or maybe there’s no “prodye-” sound in English? English is not my mother tongue.
both dictionaries show the same pronuciation. but both divide the word llike “di” is in an open syllable.
BTW, i trust distionary.com too. the website is excellent.
Well they won’t put the dot behind “digi” because putting in that second “i” makes it seem as if you have two syllables there. I understand that you think the second “i” should stick with the “g” because without the “i”, the “g” wouldn’t be read as a J sound, right?
Two issues:
1) The big issue here is trying to parse a spelling form into syllables. In English, the spelling does not always map so well onto the sound form. Consider “example”. How would you show that the sound [ks] is represented by one letter, “x”? How would you break it up into syllables if all you had was the letter representation?
Because of this not super mapping between written form – even in an alphabetic written language like English – and sound form, linguists use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). And if you look closely at the Dictionary.com entry, you’ll see that it actually uses a pronunciation code in which the site lists the syllabification as [pruh-dij-uhs]. You also have an option for IPA /prəˈdɪdʒ əs/.
2) The other issue is more subtle. Even for linguists, it’s not always easy to break a word up into neat syllables. Anyone who’s done acoustic analysis of speech can tell you that. Sometimes it’s very clear, but there are certain sound boundaries that just kind of bleed into each other. The syllable contact between the 2nd and 3rd syllables in “prodigious” is one place where there is a bit of murk. You’ll notice that in the pronunciation keys given at Dictionary.com (which I give above, the ones in IPA and pronunciation code), they attribute the consonant which you chose to represent as “gi” to the second syllable. I personally would argue that it is ambisyllabic, that is, it closes the second syllable and serves as the start of the third. Really, to me it seems more like [prəˈ dɪd dʒəs] with the closing consonant sound at the end of the second syllable being an unreleased post alveolar stop.
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