Syllable rime

In the study of phonology in linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda. It is the part of the syllable used in poetic rhyme, and the part that is lengthened or stressed when a person elongates or stresses a word in speech.

The rime is usually the portion of a syllable from the first vowel to the end. For example, IPA|/æt/ is the rime of all of the words "at", "sat", and "flat". However, the nucleus does not necessarily need to be a vowel in some languages. For instance, the rime of the second syllables of the words "bottle" and "fiddle" is just IPA|/l/, a liquid consonant.

"Rime" and "rhyme" are variants of the same word, but the rarer form "rime" is sometimes used to mean specifically "syllable rime" to differentiate it from the concept of poetic rhyme. This distinction is not made by some linguists and does not appear in most dictionaries.

Rime structure

{| style="border:0;"
-
"scipu" and "wordu". [cite book
title = A Prosodic Grammar of Chinese
last = Feng
first = Shengli
page = 3
publisher = University of Kansas
year = 2003] ||
-Just as the rime branches into the nucleus and coda, the nucleus and coda may each branch into multiple phonemes. [The limit for the number of phonemes which may be contained in each varies by language. For example, Japanese and most Sino-Tibetan languages do not have consonant clusters at the beginning or end of syllables, whereas many Eastern European languages can have more than two consonants at the beginning or end of the syllable. In English, the onset, nucleus, and coda may all have two phonemes, as in the word "flouts": [fl] in the onset, the diphthong [aʊ] in the nucleus, and [ts] in the coda.] The two illustrations below demonstrate English words with branching nucleus and coda, respectively.

Notes