Syllabication of telephone

[TABmom]

Hi. Can someone explain to me the syllabication of “telephone”. I mean, it has to be tel-e-phone. But how does it get around the ‘open syllables have a long vowel sound’ rule? Thanks.

[HomeAgain]

15 minutes ago, TABmom said:

Hi. Can someone explain to me the syllabication of “telephone”. I mean, it has to be tel-e-phone. But how does it get around the ‘open syllables have a long vowel sound’ rule? Thanks.

I would say that because the middle 'e' is by itself, it takes on the short vowel sound it would have at the beginning of a word (elephant, ember, enjoy).  It doesn't follow an open-door syllable rule because it doesn't have a consonant in front of it in the syllable.

[El...]

Well... you're right about the syllables, and you're right about the rule in general, but there are a lot of exceptions in English. Would it help to consider telephone as a combination of two Greek roots, tele (far, at a distance) and phone (voice, sound)?  

When words break standard rules, there's usually a reason from the word's background. It's nuts out there. 

[ScoutTN]

Open syllable exception. More commonly an i or a u, but not uncommon. 

[kirstenhill]

In multi-syllable words, and unaccented syllable can always have a schwa sound (usually "uh" or a short i).   The six syllable types model doesn't explicitly account for this.  As you analyze more complex words with prefixes, suffixes, and connectives, you see more cases where the six syllable types don't fully model what we see - think about "active", "literate" and "infinite" - by the six syllable model you would expect vce, but since they are suffixes, the vowel isn't long.

[*****]

As kirstenhill says, it has to do with the UNACCENTED syllable. Barton teaches that in a 3 syllable word or longer, an open i or open e in the middle of the word, when that syllable is not accented, will have its short sound. And usually that syllable is not accented.  Of course this only applies to American English words, so if you come across a word that differs from this, it may come from a different language. This rule is taught separately from the schwa sound which usually says 'uh'.  Good question for sure!

[TABmom]

Thanks everyone. I think my brain hurts now. 😂

[*****]

The key takeaway is: oh yeah, its the unaccented syllable...

[Clarita]

English is not a purely phonetic language, the spelling can also denote meaning.

5 hours ago, El... said:

Well... you're right about the syllables, and you're right about the rule in general, but there are a lot of exceptions in English. Would it help to consider telephone as a combination of two Greek roots, tele (far, at a distance) and phone (voice, sound)?  

When words break standard rules, there's usually a reason from the word's background. It's nuts out there. 

The above would be the explanation I would use. 

[ElizabethB]

I would do the overview lesson of my syllables program. It's from Greek, then a schwa, English has a lot of higher level words that schwa unaccented syllables. It explains this and more.

http://thephonicspage.org/On Reading/syllablesspellsu.html

[Malam]

when the middle e isn't pronounced as a schwa, but as short e, could the syllabication be te-le-phone?