Questions tagged [phonology]
The study of the abstract aspect of the sounds or *phonemes* in a given language.
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What is phonological mechanism?
Does it mean phonological rule? Or can we say phonological mechanism refers to the phonological rules in our mind?
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When do we use strong /biː/ instead of weak /bi/ in english?
I am wondering in which context people stress the be in English grammar.
Both Wiktionary and Wordrefence have a weak and a strong form in their dictionary :
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/be#English
...
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Labialised /r/ in RP
Is /r/ in RP labialised in all positions?
For example: In words like real, free, proud, tree, brother, borrow, dream, throw etc.
Is it labialised in all positions (like intervocalic, post-...
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What is the difference between /iə/ and /ɪə/ in /məˈtɪəriəl/ “material” (RP)?
I don't understand what's the difference between /iə/ and /ɪə/.
https://www.wordreference.com/es/translation.asp?tranword=material
Can somebody explain ?
Best Regards.
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Is it correct for the rules of this voice alternations?
I'm a graduate student from Korea. I'm doing some practice about assimilation but I don't know if it is correct.
Here is the question:
"cat" and "cats"
"dog" and "dogs"
"hen" and "hens"
And this is ...
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How were glottal stops indicated in Akkadian cuneiform?
According to Huehnergard, Akkadian had a phonemic glottal stop. This makes sense, given the language's heritage.
However, he doesn't seem to mention it anywhere in the chapters on orthography, and I ...
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67 views
What should the phonological rules be for this alternation?
I'm a graduate student from Korea. :) May I ask you guys a question about phonology?
In the data, divinity and divine, what are the phonological rule and phonological mechanisms for the alternation ...
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How to analyze these data with Optimality Theory?
I'm a graduate student from Korea. As a novice in the field of phonology, I've been confused about analysis using Optimality Theory for a long time. Could you guys help me with this question?
In ...
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Do stressed (in e.g. English) or pitched (in e.g. Japanese) phones contribute to different phonemes?
In proper tonal languages such as cantonese or mandarin, the phones a phoneme comprises of share the same tone. In other words, mā (in pinyin) and má are clearly different phonemes.
If I were to look ...
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Are there any recent studies on vowels of PRS?
Consonants and their phenomena are well studied for PRS (Puerto Rican Spanish). However, vowels and their phenomena are less well known. Known vowel phenomena in the dialect are unstressed/final vowel ...
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What are the main weaknesses of autosegmental phonology?
There are several different overarching models of phonology, with different strengths and weaknesses. For example, optimality theory is good at explaining the "conspiracies of rules" that show up in ...
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Writing a phonological rule
Could you please help me revise the phonological rule in Turkish below?
It means that "/e/ becomes [ɛ] when followed by a non-dorsal sonorant in the same syllable and if /e/ occurs at the beginning ...
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How did this alternation happen?
Wiktionary's entry for "seldom" contains the following etymology:
From late Middle English seldom, alteration of earlier
selden, from Old English seldan (“seldom”), from Proto-
Germanic *...
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1answer
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How to write phonology rules using features?
Is there a way to write the following phonology rule using features?
The /u/ becomes [ɯ] word-finally when preceded with an unrounded vowel with 1 or more intervening consonants. .
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Can loudness of speech sounds influence meaning?
In Chinese, words can have different meanings if their tones are changed, e.g. 是 (shì) and 十 (shí). In Italian, words can have different meanings if a consonant is geminated, e.g. sete and sette.
My ...
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What is a natural class in phonology? How to use phonological features to identify classes?
What are natural classes in phonology? Can phonological features make a set of segments a natural class?
For example, is there any way to make a natural class out of the set:
[k, x, q,χ]?
What ...
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Has the Russian way of pronunciation been affected by frost?
I am a student learning both English and Russian, and I find the Russian pronunciation to be very different from the English one. A few months ago I made a detailed post on the Linguistics SE to ...
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Is there a term for the position of a phoneme in a word?
I am studying emerging Brazilian Portuguese consonant clusters and I'm unaware of how to properly call a group of positions such as "word-initial" or "word-final position". The aim is to use this term ...
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Phonemes or allophones?
In our coursebook, introducing phonology by David Odden, one of the exercise questions asks us to decide if the obstruents of Thai are phonemes or allophones.
My teacher says they are allophones but ...
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What is this Cree sound in IPA?
https://nehiyo.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/uy-uyiwak.mp3
I have been trying to find an equivalent to this sound. The language is Canadian Plains Cree. It's not "i" as in bite or fight.
Is there an ...
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3answers
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What do these subscripts/superscripts mean in IPA?
Here is an example of a sentence from the Glossika course in Taiwanese Hokkien:
The "Phonics" line is the IPA line. (The "Typing" line is the Tâi-lô romanization; I don't know where the "...
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1answer
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Final intonation of a question in a pitch-accent language
How do pitch-accent languages deal with potential confusion between the pitch to distinguish two words, and the pitch to make a question?
For example, if you got word 'Ab' and word 'aB', how could ...
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How well do Semitic languages preserve consonants over time?
I'm not too familiar with the details of Semitic languages, but as far as I can tell it seems the tri-consonantal roots of words are relatively important. If the consonants change over time, did they ...
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Is there a linguistic term for replacing past tense verb with present tense?
In my dialect of English (North West England), we sometimes use the present tense of a verb when standard English employs the past tense, such as in the sentence below:
"I waits for the bus ...
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How can we trace the source of orthographic inconsistency?
It is known that orthography has both positive and negative effects on second language acquisition. However, I can't really figure out when the effect is due to the L1, the L2 or both.
For example, ...
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How were this feminine mutations originated in Welsh?
It is known that the celtic languages have mutations, for instance:
Welsh:
*transcription depicts North Welsh dialects
• normal form: Cymru [ˈkəmrɨ̞] (Wales);
• soft mutation: Gymru [ˈɡəmrɨ̞] (ex.:...
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Why do Spanish and Greek have such a similar phonology?
Is it just a matter of coincidence or did the two language influence each other in some way?
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The schwa in [meɪkəθ] for *maketh* in KJV English
This Wiki article seems to suggest that words like makes had lost their final syllable schwa in normal speech already by Chaucer's time (palmeres > palmers is the example they give). The rule, as ...
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Why are dental sounds rare?
Dental stops are rare in the languages of the world (other than in Australia). Most languages outside of Australia containing dental stops belong to Indo-European, Uralic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian. ...
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Is the “p” in “spin” really a “b”?
Daniel Everett claims in Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (Ch. 11) that the English "p" and "b" in "pin" and "bin" are separate phonemes, since they alone distinguish the words "pin" and "bin," whereas ...
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Familiarity with any/innie merger in American English?
It was recently pointed out to me that I pronounce “any” ( and the related anything, anymore, etc.) as /ˈɪn.i/ instead of /ɛn.i/. Does anyone know a regional variation of American English that has ...
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What happened to “accented velars” in Anatolian?
One of the oldest splits within Indo-European was between the Centum and Satem languages; they differ in what they did to the "accented velar" phonemes (like *ḱ and *ǵ).
However, if I understand ...
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Does the analysis of syllables via mora imply that syllable duration is quantized?
From the wikipedia article:
"The definition of a mora varies. In 1968, American linguist James D.
McCawley defined it as "something of which a long syllable consists of
two and a short syllable ...
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1answer
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Why are PIE C+glide clusters so rare?
I noticed that *Cj/*Cy (depending on if one uses IPA or IEist notation) and *Cw sequences are rare in PIE (with most being the result of schwebeablaut or regular ablaut). Among sequences that aren't ...
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Long vowels in the world languages
The English language has long and short vowel sounds. Short and long vowels also exist in some other languages. And it's interesting to know when native English speakers come to let it be the Czech ...
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Looking for Spanish varieties/accents
This might not be the right place to ask this, and if so, I apologize. I'm a student conducting research on Spanish varieties and I am wondering if anyone knows where I could find short texts read by ...
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1answer
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Understanding VOT
I am a third year bachelor student of Linguistics. It would be nice if I don't get mean comments, because I genuinely do not understand what I am about to ask.
I have to write a paper on phonetic ...
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What sort of features contrast in some signed languages but not others?
I don't know anything about sign language linguistics, and the Wikipedia page on ASL phonology wasn't very helpful, and suggested wide ranges of allophony.
In considering phonemes as equivalence ...
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1answer
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How to read and understand linguistics articles?
I was wondering if there is a good way to read and understand Quantitative linguistics articles that has graphs in it?
For example,
For a class, I am currently reading: "Recognition of spoken ...
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Glottal stops- comparative frequency among commonly spoken languages
I'm a brand new member who enjoys words and languages but I am not a trained linguist.
Which common languages of the world, and families of languages, are considered the most glottal (most glottal ...
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Do voiceless approximants exist? What is the consensus among phoneticians/phonologists?
Voiceless sounds that are produced with supralaryngeal configurations that would be considered approximants if voiced are attested in languages (i.e. [j̊], [l̥], etc.), but none are found to contrast ...
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2answers
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What's a good introduction to constraint-based phonology?
I am playing with the idea of building a language parser/transformer and getting into the structure of pronunciations. This leads me to try and come up with rules for the parser for understanding how ...
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1answer
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What is known about the voicing of Hittite consonants?
Most consonants in Hittite appear in two variants, conventionally called "voiced" and "voiceless": "voiceless" consonants are written twice in a row, while "voiced" consonants are written only once. ...
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Is the study of triphthongs a must to master English phonology?
Most universities in India are teaching only pure vowels (monophthongs), and diphthongs. Now we find triphthongs. ...
Is the study of triphthongs a must to master the phonology of English? ...
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Does pre-fortis clipping only operate within a syllable? If not, what is its actual scope?
English is known to have a phenomenon of "pre-fortis clipping": in certain contexts, vowel and sonorant phonemes before a fortis/voiceless consonant are realized with shorter duration than the same ...
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Phonetic distortion when words are borrowed among languages
When languages borrow words from other languages, they sometimes deliberately distort words to make them phonetically easier to pronounce.
For example, when Japanese speakers are taught the word "...
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(proto-)Germanic evidence for Late Latin vowel length
I would like to find a list of borrowings illustrating the reflexes in (proto-)Germanic of Latin long and short vowels. In particular I would like to find substantiation to the standard claim that it ...
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1answer
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Is it possible to recognize place of articulation of consonants through spectrograms?
I am trying to undestand how PRAAT works and to recognize consonants through spectrograms. I Know that it's possible to distinguish fricative consonants from nasal ones (for example) but is it ...
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How do people pick an abbreviation for a technical term?
Today I heard “regex,” short for “regular expression,” out loud for the first time with a /dʒ/ instead of a /g/ as I had always guessed. I felt the same experience when I first heard the abbreviation ...
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Is it possible to speak like a native speaker of English by mastering the phonology?
I know some professors of phonetics teach phonetics(in a country like India) in a laboratory almost similar to that of the native speakers.But when they come out of the class their pronunciation does ...
