Primarily in

Austroasiatic languages The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are t ...

(also known as Mon–Khmer), in a typical word a minor syllable is a reduced (minor)

syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological ...

followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable. The minor syllable may be of the form or , with a

reduced vowel In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic ''quality'' of vowels as a result of changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word (e.g. for the Creek language), and which are pe ...

, as in colloquial Khmer, or of the form with no vowel at all, as in Mlabri "navel" (minor syllable ) and "underneath" (minor syllable ), and

Khasi Khasi may refer to: * Khasi people, an ethnic group of Meghalaya, India * Khasi language, a major Austroasiatic language spoken in Meghalaya, India * Khāṣi language, an Indo-Aryan language of Jammu and Kashmir, India See also * Khasi Hills * ...

"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 James Alan Matisoff ( zh, , t=馬蒂索夫, s=马蒂索夫, p=Mǎdìsuǒfū or zh, , t=馬提索夫, s=马提索夫, p=Mǎtísuǒfū; born July 14, 1937) is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a ...

in 1973 (Matisoff 1973:86). Sometimes minor syllables are introduced by language contact. Many

Chamic languages The Chamic languages, also known as Aceh–Chamic and Achinese–Chamic, are a group of ten languages spoken in Aceh (Sumatra, Indonesia) and in parts of Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Hainan, China. The Chamic languages are a subgroup of Mala ...

as well as Burmese have developed minor syllables from contact with Mon-Khmer family. In Burmese, minor syllables have the form , with no

consonant cluster In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...

s allowed in the

syllable onset A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological ...

, no

syllable coda A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...

, and no tone. Recent reconstructions of

Proto-Tai Proto-Tai is the reconstructed proto-language (common ancestor) of all the Tai languages, including modern Lao, Shan, Tai Lü, Tai Dam, Ahom, Northern Thai, Standard Thai, Bouyei, and Zhuang. The Proto-Tai language is not directly atteste ...

and

Old Chinese Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 12 ...

also include sesquisyllabic roots with minor syllables, as transitional forms between fully disyllabic words and the monosyllabic words found in modern

Tai languages The Tai or Zhuang–Tai languages ( th, ภาษาไท or , transliteration: or ) are a branch of the Kra–Dai language family. The Tai languages include the most widely spoken of the Tai–Kadai languages, including Standard Thai or S ...

and modern Chinese.

Notes

References

*Brunelle, Marc; Kirby, James; Michaud, Alexis; Watkins, Justin. (2017)
Prosodic systems: Mainland Southeast Asia
HAL 01617182. *Butler, Becky Ann. (2014). ''Deconstructing the Southeast Asian sesquisyllable: A gestural account (Doctoral dissertation)''. Cornell University. *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. *Ferlus, Michel. (2009)
What were the four Divisions of Middle Chinese?
''Diachronica, 26''(2), 184-213. HAL 01581138v2. * 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. *Kirby, James & Brunelle, Marc. (2017). Southeast Asian tone in areal perspective. In R. Hickey (Ed.), ''The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics'' (pp. 703–731). *Michaud, Alexis. (2012)
Monosyllabicization: patterns of evolution in Asian languages
In ''Monosyllables: From phonology to typology'' (pp. 115–130). HAL 00436432v3. *Svantesson, J.-O. & Karlsson, A. M. (2004)
Minor syllable tones in Kammu
In ''International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2004)''. * Thomas, David (1992)
'On Sesquisyllabic Structure'
''The Mon-Khmer Studies Journal'', 21, pp. 206–210. Phonetics {{phonetics-stub