Reduced syllable followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable
Primarily in
Austroasiatic languages (also known as Mon–Khmer), in a typical word a minor syllable is a reduced (minor)
syllable followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable. The minor syllable may be of the form /
Cə/ or /Cə
N/, with a
reduced vowel, as in colloquial
Khmer, or of the form /CC/ with no vowel at all, as in
Mlabri/kn̩diːŋ/ 'navel' (minor syllable /kn̩/) and /br̩poːŋ/ 'underneath' (minor syllable /br̩/), and
Khasikyndon/kn̩dɔːn/ 'rule' (minor syllable /kn̩/), syrwet/sr̩wɛt̚/ 'sign' (minor syllable /sr̩/), kylla/kl̩la/ 'transform' (minor syllable /kl̩/), symboh/sm̩bɔːʔ/ 'seed' (minor syllable /sm̩/) and tyngkai/tŋ̩kaːɪ/ 'conserve' (minor syllable /tŋ̩/).
This
iambic pattern is sometimes called sesquisyllabic (lit. 'one and a half syllables'), a term coined by the American linguist
James Matisoff in 1973 (Matisoff 1973:86). Although the term may be applied to any word with an iambic structure, it is more narrowly defined as a syllable with a
consonant cluster whose
phonetic realization is [CǝC].[1]
In historical linguistics
Sometimes minor syllables are introduced by language contact. Many
Chamic languages as well as
Burmese[2] have developed minor syllables from contact with Mon-Khmer family. In Burmese, minor syllables have the form /Cə/, with no
consonant clusters allowed in the
syllable onset, no
syllable coda, and no
tone.
Some reconstructions of
Proto-Tai and
Old Chinese also include sesquisyllabic roots with minor syllables, as transitional forms between fully disyllabic words and the monosyllabic words found in modern
Tai languages and modern
Chinese.
Butler, Becky Ann. (2014). Deconstructing the Southeast Asian sesquisyllable: A gestural account (Doctoral dissertation). Cornell University.
Enfield, N. J. (2018), Mainland Southeast Asian Languages: A Concise Typological Introduction, Cambridge University Press,
doi:
10.1017/9781139019552,
ISBN9781139019552
Ferlus, Michel. (2004).
The origin of tones in Viet-Muong. In Papers from the Eleventh Annual Conference of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (pp. 297–313). HAL 00927222v2.
Matisoff, James A. (1973). 'Tonogenesis in Southeast Asia'. In Larry M. Hyman (ed.),
Consonant Types and Tone (Southern California Occasional Papers in Linguistics No. 1), pp. 73–95. Los Angeles: Linguistics Program, University of Southern California.
Kirby, James & Brunelle, Marc. (2017). Southeast Asian tone in areal perspective. In R. Hickey (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (pp. 703–731).