In literary works one can often find expressions like: “He answered in monosyllables” or “Her speech was characterized by monosyllabic”, “He used only monosyllabic words”. How to understand such statements? To do this, answer the question - what are these monosyllables?
Syllable words
From the Russian language school curriculum it is known that a syllable is the smallest unit of sounding speech, due to articulation. The number of syllables in a word is determined by the number of vowels. And it can consist of one or several sounds. A syllable is also an indivisible collection of one or more sounds.
Interestingly, in the flow of sounding speech, a syllable cannot be divided into smaller elements. Formally, of course, we can distinguish individual phonemes (sounds). But in practice this is impossible to implement, because it is syllable pronunciation that is characteristic of human speech. For example, the word “ homogeneous ”, in the process of pronouncing it, sounds exactly like [hell-on-rod-j] or [a-bottom-ro-bottom j] , but not o-d-n-o-r- oh-so-so .
There are languages ​​in which syllables do not have semantic content and are not related to parts of a word. These include the vast majority of European languages, including Russian. For this reason, the distinction between each individual syllable in them can vary. For example, the word " homeless " can be divided into syllables in different ways:
- homeless;
- homeless;
- homeless;
- bewitching .
In a number of other languages, which, in particular, includes Chinese, the syllable is a fairly stable, unchanging unit, the boundaries of which are clearly delineated. This is due to the fact that there is a merging of syllables with certain parts of the word.
The practical application of syllable
The division into syllables is used in practice when translating words in handwritten and printed texts. Interestingly, the boundaries of the phonetic syllables of a particular word (that is, those that can be distinguished in the sounding speech) may not coincide with the boundaries of the syllables used for transfer.
The division of the word into syllables is the basis in a number of poetic systems used since ancient times. It is the syllable that is taken here as the basis for the reason that such a division can be carried out by a person on an intuitive level, which means that it does not require any developed theoretical basis.
In music, in musical notation of vocal works, syllable text is used. It is usually located under the stave.
In such a record, a separate syllable is placed under each note or chord.
Monosyllables are what?
By the name itself, it is not difficult to guess the meaning of the term given in the subtitle. So, a monosyllabic word is such a structural unit of the language, in which there is only one syllable. Accordingly, the vowel letter in here will also be one. It should be noted that in our language there are a lot of similar words. Here are some examples of monosyllables in Russian: peace, home, bread, juice, yes, no .
By the way, most pronouns in all European languages ​​are monosyllabic.
It is curious that in the Russian language there is even an eight-letter adverb in one syllable - “ casual ”, and several monosyllabic words have a length of seven letters, for example: “ emerge”, “passion” . And one more interesting fact: in our language there is only one monosyllabic adjective - “ evil” .
Monosyllabic words in foreign languages
In the Chinese language there are much more words consisting of one syllable than in Russian. Most of them are the names of phenomena that have been familiar to mankind since ancient times: man, sky, rain, and so on. Many monosyllabic words in the Chinese language have lost their independence and today are only integral parts of compound words.
English is also quite rich in the described lexical units.
As in Chinese, they named mainly natural phenomena. Monosyllabic is also almost all English pronouns. Monosyllabic English words even have special reading rules.
Examples of the use of Russian monosyllables
Another meaning of the word “monosyllabic” is laconic, short. This may be, for example, a replica in a dialogue. Monosyllabic speech usually characterizes a literary character as secretive, laconic, or is a demonstration of the fact that, due to various circumstances, he dislikes conversation. Monosyllabic words in the Russian language, in addition to their brevity, have one more advantage: the stress in them is not in doubt.
In the end, it is worth saying that poetic creativity even has a special poetic size - brachycolon, in which only monosyllables are used. This type of verse is most often used to give the work a comic effect or to enhance the rhythm of the poetic text. This size can be written as the whole poem, or part of it.
So, as you can see, monosyllables are also a literary phenomenon.