SECTION IX: PHENOMENA CONNECTED WITH THE AGGREGATION OF SOUNDS INTO SYLLABLES.
261. Each individual syllable has a summit. In IN this is almost always a vowel, and only quite exceptionally a voiced sound of some other kind. It is true that IN possesses words of form having no vowel, such as n, "of", m, "thy", but these appear almost invariably only after a vowel, with which they then combine to form a syllable. "Thy gain", in Toba, is labám < laba + m, but "thy house" is bagasmu.—An exception is formed by Gayo, where n, "of", can stand between two consonants, as in bět n se, "(after the) fashion of this". Here the nasal n is placed between two sounds that are deficient in sonority; it must therefore be a nasalis sonans, and is accordingly the summit of a syllable. The same is the case in Dayak phenomena like blióṅ-m, "thy chopper", where m for mu also comes after a consonant and is a nasalis sonans. An illustration in support of this is to be found in the Story of Sangumang, Bijdr. 1906, p. 201, 1. 10: "How many choppers hast thou?" = How + many are choppers thine = pirä aton blióṅ-m.—Seidenadel says in § 17 of his Bontok grammar: "Final l often becomes a sonant liquid, similar to l in our (English) word bottle"; but he gives no instance, and in all the texts I have found nothing to correspond with this assertion.
262. Certain phonetic processes may cause a shifting of the summit of a syllable. Most of the IN languages (as stated in § 4) accentuate the penultimate, thus áwak, "body", báyar, "to pay", and the like. The summit of the first syllable of each of these words is the a before the semi-vowel. Toba changes awak into aoak, Tawaelia turns bayar into
