So, this week will be similar to last week in that we’re looking at pronunciation on a word- rather than sound level, but we’ll mostly be looking at longer words this week, and rather than thinking about which syllables are stressed, we’re thinking about places where syllables disappear. The linguistic term for this is “syncope” /sɪŋkəpi:/, which interestingly is also used in medical English as the official term for fainting. So, syncope is connected with losing something: consciousness (temporarily), in medical English, and a syllable in phonology. Some definitions would extend this to a single sound, which we may otherwise call a silent letter, for example the ‘t' in Christmas or the ‘d’ in Wednesday, but we won’t include those today. And, it’s worth pointing out that while syncope is the linguistic term, we also see this referred to as dropped syllable, silent syllable, disappearing syllables.
In terms of syllables, the easiest examples of syncope to remember are the ones you’ve been doing for years: many of the spoken and written contractions, like “aren’t” (are not), “gonna” (going to), are examples of syncope, including both the deletion of a single vowel, like the /ɒ/ in are not, or consonants and vowels, like in going to. Syncope is pretty easy to get a hang of where these written contractions are used, of course. It’s tricker within single words, where there is no written contraction, so no visual clue that syncope happens. So, we’re going to look at some of the most common words with disappearing syllables in British English. Unfortunately, this is one of those things for which there is no rule. However, you’ll notice that all these words are three syllables or longer, and that the dropped syllable is never a stressed syllable. It’s very often the one after the stressed syllable, though. The dropping of the syllable doesn’t mean that all sounds within the syllable a dropped, either – generally, the vowel sound (often schwa) is dropped, but the consonants may join other syllables. Finally, it’s worth noting that while most British English speakers will drop these syllables most of the time, there are times, for example if the speaker is purposefully speaking slowly or clearly, that you might hear that extra syllable. This will be great listening practise for you moving forwards: where do you notice these syllables being dropped? In terms of your own speech, you’re likely to find that there are words where you already produce the shorter form – that is, the word with the dropped syllable – because you’ve learnt the word from listening to other speakers. However, there will probably be some which you’ve learnt by reading, where you might tend to produce the full form, and where it will then be fun to experiment with dropping that syllable.
Listen, and repeat:
- actually
- average
- basically
- broccoli
- business
- camera
- Catholic
- chocolate
- comfortable
- conference
- deliberately
- desperate
- diamond
- different
- evening
- every
- extraordinary
- favourite
- February
- gardener
- general
- interest
- library
- miniature
- miserable
- mystery
- practically
- preference
- probably
- separate (adj)
- several
- temperature
- vegetable
- virtually
Ok, let’s now try some sentences with some of those words. We’ve got six sentences this week, so I’m not giving you too many here, but as always it would be great practice for you to see if you could make a sentence with each word in the list.
- I’m going to a different business conference in February.
- They had several interesting miniature vegetables.
- The temperature on Wednesday was uncomfortable.
- He was generally her favourite gardener.
- We’re going to a mystery evening at the library.
- He’s probably desperate for a new camera.
And a final fun side note, if you’ve ever struggled to pronounce an English place name, syncope might be the reason! It is behind some of the more difficult to pronounce place names in the UK, like
- Gloucester
- Leicester
- Worcester and
- Loughborough