Korean Job Discussion Forums

[flotsam]

And apparently nothing rhymes with "silver" either.

[jinks]

[bucheonleon]

[AbbeFaria]

[kiwigirl :O)]

i think that its actually two syllables

or-ange

but in korea its three syllables:
or-ran-gee

[flotsam]

[pet lover]

In elementary school, I was taught to count syllables of words by how many times my mouth opens when I say the word. Orange. It opens once. One syllable.

[Woland]

Maybe everybody's right and what's needed is explanation of how this might be so. My reference for the material on deletion and syncope below is Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. M., & Goodwin, J. M. (1996). Teaching Pronunciation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pages 163-164, to be specific), just so folks don't think I'm talking through my hat.

The canonical form of the word orange has two syllables, the first of which is stressed, while the second is unstressed.

In rapid, informal native-speaker speech, it is possible for such unstressed vowels to be deleted, as in 's'pose' for 'suppose'.

More commonly, deletion is of medial unstressed vowels following a stressed syllable in three-syllable words, a phenomenon known as syncope (which has three syllables, by the way, but doesn't undergo itself); for example, 'ev'ry' for 'every' and 'diff'rent' for 'different'. This could certainly explain the deletion of the vowel in the plural form 'oranges'.

But we really haven't completely accounted for deletion in the singular. Here's one possible explanation. The word 'orange' can be used as a modifier as well as a noun, as in 'orange shirt' or 'orange automobile'. In these contexts, the conditions for syncope are met within the phrase, and could account for deletion in the singular form, if we accept that the environment for syncope can cross word boundaries.

Note that the deletion in both the two-syllable and three-syllable conditions is optional, which may account for some of the variation that people perceive in themselves.

My personal guess is that this variation is the case in all speakers, but just in case there are speakers who always produce orange as a one-syllable word, we need to try to explain that.

Acccording to data from Tom Cobb's invaluable Compleat Lexical Tutor (http://132.208.224.131/), 'orange' occurs more frequently overall as a modifier than as a noun. (Cobb's data sources are largely written. I'm assuming that the frequencies in speech are the same; this may be incorrect.) If this is the case, it may be that the form produced by syncope becomes the standard representation for some people and is applied generally, thus explaining the consistent one-syllable folks. If I'm right that they don't exist, then this somewhat strained explanation is unnecessary.

But there we go, everyone accounted for. For the one-syllable folks, it is likely that the two-syllable pronunciation will remain 'standard' for the foreseeable future.

[jacl]

... and does anyone really say "comfortable" using four syllables? Usually it's pronounced "comftorble" or "comfterble". 3 syllables.

[Captain Corea]