>>www.dictionary.com wouldn't let me in, but I think it's like a soft l. pronouced sort of like a contraction, so pile is like pi'l. Just like Gomer says his last name "Hi, I'm Gomer Powwwll." :)
>
>I see. For some bizarre reason, I'm interested in this, so I looked up trial at dictionary.com, and it had two phonetic spellings behind it. A 2 syllable version, and a one syllable version. The 2 is pronounced like I would expect to pronounce pile because I figured they rhymed (trial > rial > rile > pile), the 1 is phoneticaly identical to the 1 syllable pile. Interesting.
Here is a key I just found http://www.bartleby.com/61/12.html. Not much, but it does mention that l is often a syllable by itself.

IAC, check out http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary. Look up compile, it has a little speaker next to the word so you can hear it proncounced. Cool. And being completely juveinile I had look up fuck just to hear the guy say it. :)

>I hate this language.

Hehe. I read somewhere that there over a half a million words in the largest dictionary. And we are supposed to know all of them. ;-)