Questions tagged [phonology]
The study of the abstract aspect of the sounds or *phonemes* in a given language.
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Vowels in the second syllable of 'harmonic' and 'harmonious'
I came across an unanswered question on English Language & Usage asking about why the vowels in the second syllable of 'harmonic' and 'harmonious' are pronounced differently.
Harmonic → /hɑːˈmɒn....
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1answer
26 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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66 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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2answers
66 views
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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68 views
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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22 views
What language aptitude test do you recommend for kindergarten-grade 1? [closed]
I have read about the MLAT and PLAB language tests to test someone ability for learning languages. What test would be appropriate for a 5-6 year old? How do I choose such a test, I read that factors ...
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54 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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62 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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208 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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1answer
78 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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71 views
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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1answer
111 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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38 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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38 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
47 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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24 views
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
35 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
38 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
31 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
199 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
102 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
71 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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24 views
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
291 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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1answer
159 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
108 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
87 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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36 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
67 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 ...
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1answer
183 views
English speakers inserting R in French words
I teach French to people from various background and first languages, but one thing that most English speakers do (even very proficient ones sometimes) is adding R sounds in words. Saying 'droi' for &...
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1answer
85 views
Number of tones in Cantonese vs. Mandarin and final stops
The emergence of tones in Chinese languages (and actually most tonal languages) is, roughly speaking, due to the loss of final consonnants of syllables at an earlier stage of the language. In ...
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137 views
Why are sound changes regular?
Say, there is a word that used to be pronounced [ten] but gradually shifted to [tin]. I get it. There is always variety in how people pronounce words. Throw in some population dynamics, and the median ...
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1answer
120 views
Is there a phonological division in Slavic languages as important as the La Spezia-Rimini line? If not, is there a most important partition anyway?
All divisions of Slavic languages based on phonological criteria that I have seen so far are rather minor and/or localized (e.g. spirantization (Czech, Ukrainian) or not (Russian, Polish) of g). Is ...
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964 views
What is the name of this sound change, and do we have it in English?
I'm a Persian, I'm from Iran, and I speak Farsi.
Here, we have a very strange rule that we turn آ into و in informal conversations.
For example:
خانه = house (formal) /kh a ne/
خونه = house (informal) ...
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1answer
81 views
What part of speech is a phoneme?
I wanted to know what part of speech a phoneme might be or I wanted to know if a phoneme might be a part of speech and I wanted to know if a phoneme can be an affix. I also wanted to know what a ...
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2answers
382 views
Voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate in english?
The "officially" voiceless alveolar-palatine affricate does not exist in English. But I can clearly hear it in the sentence "Ouch that hurt" (when the computer reads this sentence ...
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1answer
43 views
Looking for contrastive feature hierarchies for Irish, Manx and/or Scottish Gaelic
Where might I find ready-made contrastive feature hierarchy trees for these languages? In the case that they aren’t available anywhere online, I may need to make my own, in which case I’m looking for ...
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2answers
947 views
Evidence that ø and œ are separate phonemes in French?
Are there any minimal pairs between ø and œ or other evidence that these are separate phonemes? I have been studying French, and so far it seems like ø is found in open syllables and œ is found in ...
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1answer
78 views
How to make a sonority curve for a word where a 'syllabic consonant' is followed by a vowel or vice versa
I've learnt that the number of peaks of sonority in a sonority curve determines the number of syllables in a word.
The number of syllables depend on the pronunciation. It may also be true for other ...
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1answer
46 views
Phonological parallel of a Lexical Decision Task
Lexical Decision Tasks have been used in psycholinguistics for long. It basically asks the participant if the word shown is meaningful (e.g. GIRL) or not (e.g. GISL) (ref: link).
But does a test like ...
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4answers
468 views
Sanskrit consonant clusters
I thought it'd be fairly easy to find a list of Sanskrit consonant clusters online, but the last hour or so has proved me wrong. There's information out there about how to write conjoined consonants ...
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1answer
77 views
What does @ mean? [closed]
What does “@“ sign mean in phonology or historical linguistics?
I saw “*@” in the context of restriction.
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1answer
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Is there any reflex of initial *h₁?
It's commonly posited that all PIE roots consist of two groups of consonants, neither of which can be empty. For example, the root *h₁ed- has the groups *h₁ and *d.
However, I'm not aware of any ...
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1answer
124 views
What does the double colon sign (::) mean in phonology?
What does the :: sign mean in phonology or historical linguistics?
Here's an example I saw:
yeri :: yatu
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What does the ◌͇ diacritic mean in the IPA?
I once saw [ʐ͇] and couldn't figure out what the diacritic meant.
Any help is appreciated.
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1answer
74 views
List of major languages that can and cannot have their pronunciation generated programmatically from the spelling [closed]
Which languages can you directly convert the spelling of the word into a "standard" pronunciation? From my understanding so far:
Chinese (through pinyin)
Hebrew (seem to have a rigid ...
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0answers
99 views
Stress bearing suffixes in Optimality Theory
Stress bearing suffixes in English words like Chinese, Japanese, cigarette, fifteen violate the non-finality constraint. Can anyone explain what other constraints outrank non-finality and allows the ...
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2answers
174 views
I have read that in Mishnaic Hebrew, some pronounced the 6th letter as waw/w and some as vav/v What is the evidence of this?
I have read that in Mishnaic Hebrew, some pronounced the 6th letter as waw/w and some as vav/v What is the evidence of this?
I see it mentioned here https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/%D7%95-vav-...
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Can languages restrict their number of distinct syllables when written by syllabaries?
Disclaimer: I am not a linguist, please provide any corrections for terminology.
From How languages compare with the number of different syllables from all words?, Yoon Mi Oh's thesis counted the ...
