Syllabisation

In reading dissyllables, trissyllables, &c. it will be easy for teachers to make their scholars understand, that instead of the division, they should substitute the simple or articulated sound which is represented by the letters that are annexed to it, and read the word all together: and that these divisions are inserted only for the sake of facilitating the syllabisation, if I may be allowed the expression.

This in print, I must say, does not look very promising as a rendering of a Pigeon’s note, but pronounced (as the natives do it) in a sort of throaty whisper, it is quite suggestive of the call, though not so actually like it as the “Biti-fin” phrase, or as is the syllabisation which appeals most to my ears—“Too-too: tutta-tutt-too.”

Syllabisation shown by use of hyphens; accented syllables in italics.

Another important point to note is that we might expect IDyOM to do rather better at modelling morphemes rather than syllables; and indeed, inspection of the results in the figure and the wider corpus do support that: false positives in the syllabisation task are often (though not always) at morpheme boundaries.[…]This leads me to the unastonishing prediction that the STM alone would work very poorly for syllabisation, because it will not learn from the corpus, but only from the prefix of each utterance as it proceeds.