Questions tagged [phonology]
The study of the abstract aspect of the sounds or *phonemes* in a given language.
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Phonological development of Middle Chinese 學 /hæwk/ to Mandarin xue /ɕye/
學 was /hæwk/ according to Baxter-Sagart transcription of Qieyun, and according to this wikipedia page, -æwk became /Jye/ in modern Mandarin, where J is a palatalized initial consonant.
What I'm ...
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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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What languages use grammaticalized spoonerisms?
Here I define a "spoonerism" as the exchange of onset sounds between initially accented words in a phrase:
"sh(oving l)eopard" instead of "loving shepherd"
"f(ighting a l)iar" instead of "lighting a ...
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What is the universal set of constraints in Optimality Theory?
According to Diana Archangeli (1997) there is a universal set of constraints (CON) that is part of our innate knowledge of language. These constraints are used in Optimality Theory, such as NOCODA: '...
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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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The letter <u> in Provençal: when is it [y] and when is it [œ]?
In most dialects of Occitan, the letter <u> is pronounced [y] generally. However, in Provençal it appears to be pronounced [œ] by some speakers some of the time.
This wikipedia article states (...
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Do puns necessarily involve referring to two (or more) extant words?
What exactly constitutes a pun? Do the words in the pun have to both be extant, or can one be a nonce/nonsense word? — Over the years, I've heard numerous usages of "puns" where one word in the ...
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Gulf Arabic vowels allophones
No matter how much I browse, I cannot find any true researcher's really precise and accurate data on the issue. Actually, I cannot find any Gulf Arabic Phonology compendium, so any help will be ...
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What's the geographic distribution of the father/bra split in American English?
In most American English dialects with the father/bother merger, the bother vowel (originally /ɔ/) unrounds, lowers, and merges into the father vowel (originally /ɑ/), with the end result being /ɑ/, ...
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Are there any slavic or romance languages/dialects with allophonic aspirated consonants?
I know a lot of slavic and romance languages don't aspirate their consonants at all, but are there any languages from these two subgroups of languages that do use aspiration as a feature of consonants?...
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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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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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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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The pronunciation of the voiced "th" in English
I speak General American English, and I pronounce voiced "th"'s in two different ways. The first, which is how I pronounce it in "the" and "father," feels somewhat like a stop; part of my tongue ...
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Where can I find auditory records of Chinese Mandarin within 1930-1970?
I am doing research on pure Chinese and I need a auditory recording made between 1930-1970. I searched for subject of anthropology in Hong Kong local library and found nothing material in auditory ...
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Can you provide a cheat-sheet for turning Proto-Indo-European dictionaries from the older style into laryngeal notation?
Much of the resources I have for Proto-Indo-European itself (not etymological dictionaries for other languages) either use Laryngeal notation but are limited in scope (like Wiktionary) or are written ...
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How did latin "de post" become Romanian "după"?
Wouldn't the expected result be: "dopă"? I understand that the short "e" was assimilated by the long "o" from the next word, and then /o/ -> /ə/, but why o -> u ?
...
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Is "dzeru" : "ceru" a minimal pair in Latvian?
I'm finding it a bit hard to determine the prosody of these words. I'm basically asking if "dzeru" and "ceru" are prosodically identical.
If "dzeru" : "ceru" ...
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Did Classical Latin lack tenseness contrast in long and short vowels?
Contrary to the traditional supposition of /ɪ ʊ ɛ ɔ/ vs /iː uː eː oː/, the idea that Classical Latin contrasted the short and long versions of high and mid (or just mid) vowels only quantitatively, ...
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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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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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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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(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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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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Forced Aligner doesn’t work on denoised sound file
I’m using p2fa to do aligning for a sound file. Because the speaker has some heavy breath that was misinterpreted as words, I used praat to denoise it, and it sounds pretty good. However, p2fa almost ...
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How are LH words assigned stress in Latin if we assume maximally bimoraic feet?
I recently came across a paper, "The Quantitative Trochee in Latin" (by R. Armin Mester, 1994) that seems to argue that feet in Latin were "strictly" bimoraic.
The arguments that Mester gives for ...
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Is there an instructive image where I can see a spectrum and a spectrogram, side-by-side?
I’m sometimes confused about representations of speech sounds.
Even if I know a spectrum is 2D and a spectrogram is 3D, and the axes are different, I often struggle to figure our what I’m looking at....
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In English, what rules govern the optimal order of nouns in a list?
For example, is noun word-order governed by a universal ranking of semantic fields, as with adjectives, or do other considerations in general English word choice and order (well-formedness of ...
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Reviewing the evidence of the spirantization of β (betacism) in Greek
Although I understand that it is impossible to assign a specific time to any sound change in Greek, I am curious about the spirantization of voiced stops, particularly of beta. I'll present the ...
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Word classes reliant on phonological form?
1) Are there any documented languages in which a certain word class corresponds to a particular phonological structure?
A. CVC(VC) = Noun
In Polish, the word kot 'cat' (CVC) corresponds to a ...
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What are the foundational papers in computational phonology?
I'm working on a paper on the history of computational phonology.
As I understand it, Chomsky & Halle's SPE acted as a catalyst for research in the field, namely by laying the foundations for two-...
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What is the difference between an ejective consonant and a sequence of consonant + glottal stop?
Is it just the simultaneousness?
Also - can a sequence of say uvular stop and glottal stop become - diachronically - an uvular ejective?
Thanks :))
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How can I distinguish different consonants in Praat/acoustic analysis?
How can I distinguish different consonants based on acoustic information/spectrographic analysis such as in Praat? Is there a list of acoustic cues for different consonants like there is for average ...
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Where can I find books from the late 17th/early 18th century about English grammar, and books from the same period about English phonology?
I'm interested in finding books that explain English grammar (as much of it and in as much depth as possible), written by scholars from the late 17th/early 18th century. Which do you recommend? Could ...
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Origin of vowel-h digraphs that English speakers use to represent phonemes
The majority of English speakers are not proficient in the International Phonetic alphabet or any other phonetic transcription system outside their own orthography. However, we often feel the need to ...
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L-epenthesis/allophony in unexplained circumstances in American English
I've been having trouble articulating this question, so I'm sorry if it's poorly worded.
I'm a teenage English speaker from Chicago. I've recently noticed a seemingly odd allophonic possibility in ...
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Pronunciation of the letter g in Vietnamese
According to Wikipedia, the letter g represents the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ in Vietnamese. However, I could swear that, while I do hear people pronounce it as /ɣ/ sometimes, but more often than not,...
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Looking for linguistics book my dad had when i was young
Hello linguistics people...
When I was young, one of the books in my father's library had a unique conceit: it aimed to improve the English language. So it proposed changes, and from then on the ...
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Plosives with trilled release or allophones of /u/?
I've been looking at contexts where [ʙ] arises and I stumbled on the Namuyi wikipedium. This presents a really interesting phonology, with phonemic /pʙ/, /tʙ/, /bʙ/, and /dʙ/. Now I don't generally ...
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Is there a principled reason behind differing compound verb stress in English?
Is there a principled difference between compound verbs in English with stress on the first root and those with stress on the second root?
First root stress compound verbs:
Dropkick
Spoonfeed
...
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Andrea Bocelli Aspiration
I have been listen to Andrea Bocelli's songs lately. A noticeable feature of his pronunciation while singing Spanish songs is that he constantly pronounces the plosives (especially at word-initial ...
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Do we have an Intonation "etymology"?
Recently I was thinking about a language I'm currently learning and its similarities with my own native language. While I assume grammar to change considerably depending on language it came to mind ...
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What are some authoritative Vietnamese Dictionaries? …and how do they disambiguate the two pronunciations of <gia>?
What are some authoritative Vietnamese dictionaries? …and how do they disambiguate the two pronunciations of <gia>? (Something with an English or Chinese gloss is preferred.)
Wikipedia on the ...
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An analogy to understand phonetics and phonology
Is it accurate to make this statement?
An analogy of the difference between phonetics and phonology can be made with music. Phonetics would be the study of the vocals and sounds made by instruments ...
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How to understand the difference between "Strong" & "Weak" Hypotheses in the case of Bolinger/Lieberman's views of Intonation?
1. Non-Whorfian contexts and missing Czech equivalents
To begin with, I am not sure if this is the right place to ask a question that may just as well pertain to scientific terminology in general. ...
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Confusion matrix for consonant clusters in English?
I was wondering if anybody knew of a confusion matrix for consonant clusters in the English language. I've seen CV, VC, and CVC phoneme/syllable confusion matrices, but never any with any sort of ...
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Can Malay or Indonesian ever have an /n/ followed by a /g/?
Malay and Indonesian are considered to be very phonetically spelled with the usually cited exception being that orthographic "e" can represent either /e/ or /ə/.
In both orthographies the sound /ŋ/ ...
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Theories on L1 transfer/interference in L2 pronunciation/phonetics/phonology
What theories explain the transfer of phonetic and phonological features from the first language to a second or foreign language?
How do these theories differ from each other?
Such theories should ...
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Given two vowel phonemes that contrast by length alone, will their phonetic realizations typically have different vowel qualities?
Given two vowel phonemes that contrast by length alone, will their phonetic realizations typically have different vowel qualities?
For example, if a language has two vowel phonemes, /ɑ:/ and /ɑ/, ...
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What are the allophones of /ɹ/ in General Western English?
What are the allophones of /ɹ/ in General Western English?
By General Western English, I mean the dialect of English that is spoken by people raised in Seattle, WA; Portland, OR; and other ...
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