Primarily in Austroasiatic languages (also known as Mon–Khmer), in a typical word, a minor syllable, presyllable, or sesquisyllable, is a reduced (minor) syllable followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable. The minor syllable may be of the form or , with a reduced vowel, as in colloquial Khmer language, or of the form with no vowel at all, as in Mlabri language 'navel' (minor syllable ) and 'underneath' (minor syllable ), and Khasi language 'rule' (minor syllable ), syrwet 'sign' (minor syllable ), 'transform' (minor syllable ), 'seed' (minor syllable ) and tyngkai 'conserve' (minor syllable ).
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.
In historical linguistics
Sometimes minor syllables are introduced by language contact. Many
Chamic languages as well as
Burmese language have developed minor syllables from contact with Mon-Khmer family. In Burmese, minor syllables have the form , 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 language.
See also
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Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area
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Stress in Khmer
Notes
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Brunelle, Marc; Kirby, James; Michaud, Alexis; Watkins, Justin. (2017). Prosodic systems: Mainland Southeast Asia. HAL 01617182.
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Butler, Becky Ann. (2014). Deconstructing the Southeast Asian sesquisyllable: A gestural account (Doctoral dissertation). Cornell University.
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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.
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Ferlus, Michel. (2009). What were the four Divisions of Middle Chinese?. Diachronica, 26(2), 184-213. HAL 01581138v2.
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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.
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Kirby, James & Brunelle, Marc. (2017). Southeast Asian tone in areal perspective. In R. Hickey (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (pp. 703–731).
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Michaud, Alexis. (2012). Monosyllabicization: patterns of evolution in Asian languages. In Monosyllables: From phonology to typology (pp. 115–130). HAL 00436432v3.
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Svantesson, J.-O. & Karlsson, A. M. (2004). Minor syllable tones in Kammu. In International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2004).
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Thomas, David (1992). 'On Sesquisyllabic Structure'. Mon-Khmer Studies, 21, pp. 206–210.
