English

Noun

syllabist ‎(plural syllabists)

1. One who forms or divides words into syllables.
   • 1842, The Foreign Quarterly Review, volume 28, page 335:

     These are but slight tricks compared with what have been played with the Hebrew and Arabic; and we verily believe that a clever syllabist could take any English sentence and show that it was any given language and had any given meaning.

   • 2009, Laura Dabundo, “Metrical Theory and Versification”, in Encyclopedia of Romanticism (Routledge Revivals):

     The relationship between these views and the Coleridgean preoccupation with "organic" versus "mechanic" form is sufficiently obvious; the theoretical distance between this view and the rationalizing tendencies of the syllabists is vast.

   • 2015, Alex Perminger, editor, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, page 527:

     In Yugoslavia the special qualities of the Serbian, the Croatian and the Slovenian languages, above all the musical accent, account for the long disputes between the “syllabists” and the “tonists” in the beginning of this century (and earlier).

Related terms

• syllabism