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I have been focusing a lot on words the past 5-10+ years, and especially on classifying words as 1, 2, 3+ syllables. But sometimes words that are "traditionally" assumed to be 1 syllable are, in my honest opinion, 2.

  • fire: Going to die on this hill but fire is 2 syllables. You can blur your pronunciation of the two to make it one syllable, but it is really a quick pronunciation of "fai-yer".
  • feel: This one I am still debating with myself over many years, but any /il/ words seem to be two syllables but barely: "fee-yuhl".
  • tail: Same thing.

The main rules I have collected for making syllables is encoded in this code, but basically you have the general rules:

  • Vowel-like sounds are the nucleus. But sometimes what we consider consonants (m, n, l, s, r, etc..), can be the nucleus of syllables too ("button", with the /n/ as its own syllable).
  • Consonants on the boundaries (or nothing if at beginning/end of word).

But focusing on the sound of "fire" like I said (2 syllables), it is almost like a transition between two vowels (ai-er). So what exactly is the structure of the TRANSITION between two syllables? I can't clearly define it yet.

Is it the shape of the mouth? The shift in some structures of your mouth anatomy? Or what?

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    You seem to be pointing to an answer with your transcriptions: you wrote the transition as "y" (/j/), the glide/semivowel. Commented Sep 6 at 22:51
  • The answer is “relatively low sonority”. The details differ between languages, and in some cases, dialects. “Fire” is a great example: Some dialects allow a diphthong followed by a sonorant consonant, so this parsed as one syllable. Others don’t, so this is parsed as two syllables. Commented Sep 7 at 16:22

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In many dialects of English, certain consonant sounds can act as vowels (that is, forming a syllable nucleus) under certain circumstances. One common one is /l/ in coda position after a high vowel or diphthong that ends in a high vowel; if you speak one of these dialects, "fool" and "gruel" rhyme, but if you don't, "fool" is one syllable (the same way "foal" and "fall" are) and "gruel" is two.

I'm not aware of any prominent dialects where "fire" is one syllable, though. /ɹ/ after diphthongs almost always forms its own syllable.

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  • For fire: maybe the Southern US shift of /ai/ to /a/? But that's sort of cheating, because it's no longer a diphthong. Commented Sep 6 at 23:35
  • Very posh/affected RP will also generally realise fire as something like [fɑ͡äː] (not sure exactly how to write it… it’s sort of diphthongal, but the difference between the two parts is quite minute). Commented Sep 7 at 1:39
  • @JanusBahsJacquet it was triphthongal /aɪ̯ə̯/ which could then be realised as bisyllabic [aɪ̯ə] (comparable with the [ɑɪ̯ə] which is the only realisation found in modern Standard Southern British English) or with triphthong reduction as either [aːə̯] or [aː] (note that the quality of the first element is intermediate beween the [ɑː] in PALM and the [æ] in TRAP), and only marginally as an actual phonetic triphthong [aɪ̯ə̯] Commented Sep 7 at 10:27
  • ftr my own speech, which is mostly SSBE, does have a few RP-isms, and one of them is that I do have monosyllabic NEAR, TIRE, TOWER, and LAYER (albeit in variation with the more standard bisyllabic forms). I only have bisyllabic LOWER and LOYAL though. Commented Sep 7 at 10:34
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    @DanGetz As in, making /l/ a nucleus causes "fool" to have two syllables. Commented Sep 11 at 16:00

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