The Syllable in English and Arabic: a contrastive Study

02
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02
 
زح
ٌاري
0202
خيراتب
61
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4
/
0202
ةيساسلاا ةيبترلا ةيلك ةلمج
ةيرصيتشلما ةعمالجا
after this centre, that is, at the beginning and end of the syllable, there will be 
greater obstruction to airflow and less loud sound (Roach, 2009: 70).  
Clark and Yallop (1995: 411) argue that the syllable is the smallest 
possible unit of speech. Every word must contain at least one syllable called a 
"minimum syllable." A minimum syllable would be a single vowel in 
isolation such as the words "are" /a:/, and "or" /o:/. Isolated sounds such as 
"m," which is produced to indicate agreement, or "sh," to ask for silence, are 
also regarded as syllables. 
A syllable can be divided for descriptive purposes into: onset, referring to 
the initial functional element of the syllable, and rhyme. The rhyme of the 
syllable can be divided into: nucleus, which is the compulsory part of the 
syllable, and hence its head. The second part of the rhyme is coda, which 
consists of any final consonant(s), such as "east" /i:st/ which is a single 
syllable containing two consonants as a coda (Katamba, 1989: 154). 
1.4 Analysis of Syllable Structure 
If the first syllable of the word in question begins with a vowel, the 
syllable is said to have a zero onset (Giegerich, 1992: 138) If the syllable 
begins with one consonant, that initial consonant may be any consonant 
phoneme except /ŋ/ and /з/ (Durand, 1990: 216). If two or more consonants 
precede the centre of the syllable, there will be a consonant cluster. 
For Roach (2009: 73), initial two-consonant clusters are of two sorts in 
English. One sort is composed of /s/, which is called pre-initial, followed by 
one of a small set of initial consonants as in "sting" /stiŋ/, 'sway" /swei/, 
"smoke" /smәuk/. These clusters are shown in the following table: 
Table (1): Two-consonant Clusters with Pre-initial s 
Pre-initial Initial 
s plus p t k f m n l
w j 
/spin/ /stik/ /skin/ /sfiә/ /smel/ /snәu/ /slip/
/swim/ /sju:/ 
The other sort begins with one of a set of about fifteen consonants, 
followed by one of the set l, r, w, j as in, for example, "play" /plei/, "try" 
/trai/, "quick" /kwik/, few /fju:/ (ibid.). 
There is a clear relationship between two and three initial consonant 
clusters. The number of possible initial three-consonant clusters is small and 

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