However, an alternative that has received some support is to treat an intervocalic consonant as "ambisyllabic", i.e. belonging both to the preceding and to the following syllable: . This is discussed in more detail in . The onset (also known as anlaut) is the consonant sound or sounds at the beginning of a syllable, occurring before the nucleus. Most syllables have an onset. Syllables without an onset may be said to have a "zero onset" – that is, nothing where the onset would be. Some languages restrict onsets to be only a single consonant, while others allow multiconsonant onsets according to various rules. For example, in English, onsets such as "pr-", "pl-" and "tr-" are possible but "tl-" is not, and "sk-" is possible but "ks-" is not. In Greek, however, both "ks-" and "tl-" are possible onsets, while contrarily in Classical Arabic no multiconsonant onsets are allowed at all. Some languages forbid null onsets. In these languages, words beginning in a vowel, like the English word "at", are impossible. This is less strange than it may appear at first, as most such languages allow syllables to begin with a phonemic glottal stop (the sound in the middle of English "uh-oh" or, in some dialects, the double T in "button", represented in the IPA as ). In English, a word that begins with a vowel may be pronounced with an epenthetic glottal stop when following a pause, though the glottal stop may not be a phoneme in the language. Few languages make a phonemic distinction between a word beginning with a vowel and a word beginning with a glottal stop followed by a vowel, since the distinction will generally only be audible following another word. However, Maltese and some Polynesian languages do make such a distinction, as in Hawaiian "fire" and / "tuna". Hebrew and Arabic forbid empty onsets. The names "Israel", "Abel", "Abraham", "Iran", "Omar", "Abdullah", and "Iraq" appear not to have onsets in the first syllable, but in the original Hebrew and Arabic forms they actually begin with various consonants: the semivowel in "yisrāʔēl", the glottal fricative in "heḅel", the glottal stop in "ʔaḅrāhām" and "ʔīrān", or the pharyngeal fricative in "ʕumar", "ʕabduḷḷāh", and "ʕirāq".