As I progress towards middle age I find myself disconcertingly warming to the musical tastes of my father. Recently I’ve been indulging in a spot of Simon & Garfunkel, and while I find much of their output rewarding I have noticed a tendency for their lyrics to include what I can only describe as over-syllable-ized words. For example “I am a rock, I am an i-i-island”, and from ‘Blues Run the Game’ “The blues are all the sa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-me” (a monosyllabic word stretched to thirteen!). On the face of it this seems like clumsy songwriting, but somehow they get away with it. So this got me thinking about syllables. Are there any words in English for which the number of syllables are not clearly defined?
There seems to be two questions here. There are many words that have variable syllables, which largely depend on what dialect and accent you’re using. For example ‘fire’ can be pronounced ‘faah’ or ‘fai-yer’. There’s no rule saying which is right or wrong. There isn’t a syllable police.
In music however, elongating words over a melody is universal. You’d be hard pressed to find any artist that doesn’t do this, apart from rap maybe. It’s most certainly not clumsy songwriter either. There are no cosmic rules behind poetry and songwriting that say you must have a different word for each syllable. The only ‘rule’ as such is whatever sounds good.
There are (at least) two problems:
Relationships between spelling/writing and spoken word are at best poorly enforced in English.
Spoken dialects of English vary considerably.
So in fact, there are a whole lot of things about English that are not clearly defined.
Something similar is the mora, which roughly relates to vowel length. We think of Japanese haiku as having five, seven, and five syllables–which is good enough for English. But actually it’s five, seven, and five moras–so a syllable with a long sounding vowel might count for two moras, and the line would appear to be short a syllable.
I pronounce “flour” and “flower” the same, and it’s always struck me as weird that one has one syllable and one two.
When I was a little kid first learning about syllables, I thought words like “smile” and “whale” had two syllables, because I heard two when I pronounced them (smy-ole, way-ole.) But maybe I’m not talking about what the OP wants to know.
I think it’s because when you put an “e” at the end of a one-syllable word, you lengthen the vowel in the middle, essentially creating a dipthong, and the number of syllables in a word generally depends on its number of vowels.
Example: “Whal” would be pronounced “wal” (short “a”); add an “e,” and you’ve got “wa-il.” (The dipthong is transcribed as /ai/.)
In normal speech, however, both “whale” and “smile” are pronounced as one syllable (I believe).
Regarding song lyrics, isn’t there a rule about using open and closed vowels? Seems to me open ones (like long “a”) can be held almost indefinitely, while closed ones give singers the fits!
That dark ‘l’ in “smile” and “whale” creates a quasi-syllable that will be more noticeble (or less) depending upon the speaker. Same with that liquid ‘r’ at the end of ‘flour’ and ‘flower.’
