Questions tagged [phonology]
The study of the abstract aspect of the sounds or *phonemes* in a given language.
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Is there any word in other languages that begins with the urdu alphabet ṛē (ڑ)?
So in Urdu language there is no word starting with Ṛe "ڑ" IPA /ɽ/ but I think there may be some words in another language that begins with Ṛe "ڑ" or have similar sound.
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752 views
What is the IPA of the two-syllable r sound in English?
For example, the word "Emperor" in IPA on Wiktionary for General American is written /ˈɛmpɹɚ/. But that's kind of cheating because ɚ is basically /ɹ/ as far as I can tell. Yet, when you say ...
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23 views
some good books to read on the major areas in Linguistics
Can anyone please suggest some good books to read on the major areas in Linguistics, including Second Language Acquisition?
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77 views
Did Proto-Indo-European have retracted /s̠/?
Was the /s/ in PIE retracted (/s̠/) as in modern Greek, standard European Spanish and most likely ancient Greek and Latin, or was it pronounced as in modern English?
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142 views
Did Sumerian have /ħ/?
According to Gelb 1961, the famous Sumerian sign É ("house, building") was originally pronounced /ħa/ (or ḥa in Semiticist transcription). The main evidence for this is loanwords into other ...
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70 views
How diachronically stable is release type?
Are there examples of languages completely shifting from (vocalic) release of all coda stops to, say, nasal release?
I imagine substrate effects could account for some of these cases (cf. unreleased ...
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44 views
Is /v/ cross-linguistically semi-voiced and powerless in devoicing preceding consonants in case of regressive assimilation? How to explain it?
In Danish, /v/ is semi-voiced, like a combination of [f] and [v], though /f/ does exist in Danish phonology.
Russian features general regressive assimilation of voicing, but this rule doesn't apply ...
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What notable works are there that try to express the structures of linguistics by modelling them with Artificial Neural Networks (ANN)?
I know of a few works in Phonology and 1 recent work in Semantics but I will not list these here since what I would really be looking for in an answer would be a survey paper or a comprehensive list.
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85 views
What linguistics degree(s) would best equip someone to develop written languages from oral ones?
If one wants to work with people-groups that have an oral language but no written language and develop a written language for those people-groups, what linguistics degree(s) would best equip that ...
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159 views
Are there languages where vowels are always oral?
I was surprised to find in Zsiga (2020: 120, 125) a claim (by Donegan & Stampe 2009) that vowels in Hawaiian, as well as oral vowels in French, are always oral.
Unfortunately Donegan & Stampe ...
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41 views
Is there a device that lets linguists measure aspiration?
Is there a device that lets linguists measure aspiration? I want to find out if languages in which aspiration can be the only difference between phonemes (e.g. Chinese) have more breath difference ...
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951 views
Any languages that consider the alveolar and uvular trill distinct consonant phonemes?
I am intrigued by the difference between alveolar and uvular trills (and related phones) within and across languages, e.g., per this map of European /r/ usage (taken from this comment), which seems to ...
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Who decides the phonemes of a given language?
Who decides the phonemes of a given language and on what basis do they decide? Do the phonemes of a language change over time, if so, who changes them? I am extremely confused about this question ...
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1answer
48 views
Which sounds in spanish sound louder: vowels or consonants?
I think vowels but I'm not so sure. I'm neither sure if vocal cords are what makes a phone be more audible and so what makes vowels be more audible than consonants or some of them.
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47 views
What is Rich Base? [closed]
What is rich base or richness of base? Thank you for your help I have found a lot of references to it but no clear definitions.
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61 views
Phonological rule for liquid dissimilation
I am trying to write a phonological rule for liquid dissimilation in Georgian, but I’ve run into some issues since I haven’t had much practice yet.
The rule I’m trying to write is for changing r into ...
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69 views
How to syllabify 'behave' and 'behaviour'?
I'm well aware of the Maximal Onset Principle which says that 'intervocalic consonants should be syllabified as the onset of the following syllable as long as the Phonotactic constraints allow it'. I ...
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Is there an example of ʔɓ/ʔɗ sounds in contrast to ʔb/ʔd in Vietnamese?
I'm unable to distinguish between the preglottalized implosives ɓ/ɗ and the preglottalized explosives b/d in Vietnamese. Is there any audio sample of these sounds that would allow me to make out the ...
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2answers
56 views
How to extract specific data from a TextGrid file?
I'm new here. Just found that there is a linguistics community on stack exchange!
I have a TextGrid file that has been output from a forced aligner, webMAUS and I mainly want to understand how to ...
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1answer
55 views
What are the core differences between generative phonology and metrical phonology?
What core features distinguish generative phonology from metrical phonology?
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36 views
Why are Australian Aboriginal languages said to have coronal and peripheral consonants?
In most languages the world over, place of articulation is divided in a fairly obvious way, with labials, coronals, dorsals, and laryngeals (each obviously potentially having various sublocations), ...
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Vowels in the second syllable of 'harmonic' and 'harmonious'
I came across a question on English Language & Usage asking about why the vowels in the second syllable of 'harmonic' and 'harmonious' are pronounced differently.
Harmonic → /hɑːˈmɒn.ɪk/
...
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1answer
47 views
Turkish stem consonant alternation
I am currently writing a paper which draws on the characteristics of Turkish (or Turkic) phonology, and would like to know more about stem consonant alternation in this language. Specifically, will ...
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96 views
Why does /zd-/ require more effort even though both the consonants have the same voicing?
In most language, the rule for combining consonants is that they should have the same voice. For example: in English, a word can never start with /zt-/ but can start with /st-/. It's not that /zt-/ ...
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What is the exact position of the tongue for [ n ] in these circumstances?
Hi I am an English learner, and I recently had this question about pronouncing n sound. I understand the standard way of pronouncing n sound is to put my tongue behind the top teeth, however, when I ...
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What was the original pronounciation of the Thai consonant symbols?
The Thai language was devised to serve two main purposes: to write Thai words and to write Sanskrit (or Pali) words. For this reason, the Thai alphabet has one consonant symbol for each Sanskrit sound ...
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57 views
Is there a paper/ source where I can find a collection of phonological rules?
I'm aware that there are many phonological rules, but I don't have a big picture of how many there are and where I can find them. Is there a book, a review paper, a website, or any source that have a ...
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1answer
67 views
What is the consensus on Sumerian auslauts?
(Or Auslaute if you want to be pretentious, I suppose.)
In Sumerian, there seems to be uncertainty about the status of final consonants in CVC signs. For example, the unmarked form of "heart"...
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228 views
Do Russian-Ukrainian bilinguals or speakers immersed in both languages switch between the pair [ʂ ʐ] and [ʃ ʒ] when they switch between the languages?
In Russian phonology there are [ʂ ʐ], while in Ukrainian phonology there are [ʃ ʒ]. The two sets sound quite identical phonetically, while the articulation positions of the two sets are different. So, ...
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2answers
118 views
What is “H5” in Egyptian?
There seems to be a general consensus that classical Egyptian had four "guttural" or "H-like" phonemes: h (building, /h/), ḥ (wick, /ħ/), ḫ (placenta?, /x/), and ẖ (animal's belly, ...
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What is the official/correct orthography for Alsatian / Elsässisch German?
As per the Wikipedia article on the Alsatian language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsatian_dialect#Orthography) the orthography
includes the latin letters A,B,C ... X,Y,Z and the following vowels ...
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117 views
Are markedness and the Sonority Sequencing Principle both language universals?
I'm looking into transfer in second language acquisition, specifically on the syllable structure of other L1s transferring onto English. I'm discussing the impact of transfer as well as the impact of ...
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44 views
Approximant and vowels
Are there vowels considered as approximants, since some linguists consider /iː/ as high glide?
I'm not sure of it but I remember I read an article about it.
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43 views
How to read sound change transcriptions? [closed]
https://chridd.nfshost.com/diachronica/
I don't understand what most of these transcriptions mean. I only know what #, #, and _x mean.
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1answer
50 views
Are coda obstruents a universal, or is the phenomenon that is caused by coda obstruents (vowel epenthesis) a universal?
Linguistics student confused about universals here. I'm writing a paper on vowel epenthesis, and I'm very lost with the categories of everything.
Tarone (1980) claims that vowel epenthesis is actually ...
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Moraic vs Non-Moraic Codas
What determines a coda to be moraic or non-moraic relative to stress? I am a little confused about this.
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1answer
36 views
Epenthesis using SPE-notation
Suppose in some language the following happens:
when the stem ends in front vowels (i, e), then adding a certain suffix X requires j insertion (so it looks like [.. i j X] or [... e j X] instead of [....
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1answer
50 views
Expressing a phonological process happening only at morpheme boundary
If some phonological process (like gemination from here) happens only at morpheme boundary (say, only in the coda of a syllable when a certain suffix is added to the stem whose final syllable is that ...
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1answer
33 views
Expressing gemination in SPE
Is there a way to express gemination in SPE notation? Is it common/correct to say things like
[+anterior] -> [+anterior][+anterior] / __ [+vowel] ?
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1answer
250 views
/t/ sound is pronounced like [ts] in British English
My question is about the sound /t/ being pronounced more like [ts] in British accent. For example,
The words like Tomato, Peter, water, task, Tom, talented, take the /t/ sound is definitely not ...
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2answers
106 views
Aspiration versus C+h cluster
Since there are languages with consonant clusters and languages with aspirated consonants, in principle there could be a language that has a surface contrast between [Ch] and [Cʰ]. Word-internally it ...
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1answer
75 views
Phonetic vs phonological consonants: What is the difference?
I come across such distinctions in quite a few places such as in this Wikipedia article, Voiceless glottal fricative, where it states: "The voiceless glottal fricative, sometimes called voiceless ...
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Guessing phoneme duration for english words
Is there an existing method or dataset, which, given just a word in English (no context), could give a best guess as to how long to make each phoneme when recreating it as speech? Obviously the true ...
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2answers
335 views
/ðæs saɪd/ versus /ɡʊb bɔɪ/ - Assimilation of place versus manner
Good day
I am facing a problem to distinguish between assimilation of place and assimilation of manner
So in Peter R's book he said that (AOM) is much less noticeable, and he provided examples which ...
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171 views
What causes a glottal stop after some silence before a vowel?
I recently asked a question Do we pronounce the vowel at the beginning of the word with a preceding glottal stop? on the English site and received a very good answer.
According to the answer on that ...
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Just how silent is the French e muet?
I know the e muet is usually considered silent. That being said, it is still often pronounced in songs and poetry (famously, in the Marseillaise). This is completely contrary to the situation in ...
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2answers
110 views
Etymology of “fiamma” in Italian [duplicate]
I don't speak Italian at all, but I was a bit surprised that the word "flame" in Italian is "fiamma" (IPA: /ˈfjam.ma/) (to compare with flamme in French, flamma in Latin and llama ...
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1answer
93 views
Languages in which vowels predominate
I was thinking about the loss of hearing that can accompany aging, and how this loss can affect the ability to communicate verbally.
Since the ability to distinguish consonants tend to diminish before ...
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38 views
Terminology about elongating a monothong or a diphthong by duration and tone
Which terminology is applicable when a monothong or diphthong is elongated in duration and with a slightly higher pitch? Would it be vowel breaking or fracturing or something else?
Example 1 (...
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1answer
70 views
How to write these rules in features?
I was wondering how do you write these rules in features using the minimum number of features to describe the segment(s) targeted by the rule in the input. I am still super new to linguistics! Thank ...
