Not for the love of syllables

I had an interesting conversation last night with Ab.'s dad last night. He mentioned something that he had said to me last year that I had forgotten. It concerned the syllable structure of English and Sumi. I thought I had misunderstood him the first time, but last night seemed to confirm my original impression.

So the conversation went something like this: in English, we have the word love (we're talking about the verb here), which is monosyllabic (has one syllable). In Sumi, the word for 'love' is kimiye, which is trisyllabic (has three syllables). However, this is actually usually pronounced as disyllabic [kim.ye], with [ki.mi.ye] only appearing in careful speech. (My own belief is that Sumi has these things called 'sesquisyllables' consisting of a weak or 'minor' syllable followed by a strong or 'full' syllable, but let's not go into that.) The point was that we 'needed' to to somehow make the Sumi word for 'love' monosyllabic or coin a monosyllabic equivalent, because the word in English was monosyllabic.

I'm sure most people would find the very thought of this absurd - afterall, all languages have their own syllable structure - but it just goes to show people's attitudes towards English here and how much power English as a language wields within such a, dare I say, post-colonial discourse.

And there are other examples: Sumi makes a meaningful contrast between the voiceless aspirated and voiceless unaspirated post-alveolar affricates /ʧ/ and /ʧh/, which have been written as 'ch' and 'chh' in the orthographic system. (Most English speakers who say the word 'church' will notice that the first sound is accompanied by a strong puff of air. This is a voiceless aspirated post-alveolar affricate. However, most Singaporean English speakers probably wouldn't have that strong a puff of air, and the sound will actually be closer to the voiceless unaspirated affricate.) Recently there's been a move to change 'chh' to 'tch', because in English we have words like 'pitch' where the same sound is represented by 'tch'. Never mind that words like 'teach' and 'church' also exist where the sound is written with 'ch', or that English does not even have a meaningful contrast between the aspirated and unaspirated affricates (so if you said 'church' without that extra puff of air, it wouldn't affect the meaning of the word). The move from 'chh' to 'tch' therefore seems rather pointless to me, unless you're trying to make the language's writing system closer to English's own crazy orthography.