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There are, then again, many more legal syllables in English than 112. English has such a capacity for consonant clusters and such a large vowel inventory, as m
by Blikkentrekker 6y ago
There are, then again, many more legal syllables in English than 112.
English has such a capacity for consonant clusters and such a large vowel inventory, as most Germanic languages do, that there are many, many possible syllables in English that are theoretically possible, that are easily pronouncible to English speakers, yet occur in no actual word.
For instance, /s k r ai d th/ is a legal English syllable, of which I am fairly certain that there is no word in the English language that contains it.
- TuringTest 6y agoActually that may be a good strategy to build a random name generator for startups, to generate nice-sounding words that are not taken :-P
- hprotagonist 6y agoeffectively just such a system is used by pharmaceutical companies to name drug candidates. For precisely this reason.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoWell this explains quite a bit. Zeproxyn, Versalin, Aspiridon, Cotrazin, — I drew those from the æther.
- tragomaskhalos 6y agoA beauty came up on Only Connect recently: "strengths". Woe betide a syllabary that attempts to cover English :)