Questions tagged [phonology]
The study of the abstract aspect of the sounds or *phonemes* in a given language.
1,010
questions
2
votes
1
answer
204
views
What is the origin of the dominance of unmarked terms?
The definition of markedness, says that unmarked terms are dominant over marked terms.
In this context, is dominance assumed to stem from biological or cultural constraints (like some sounds are ...
- 335
9
votes
2
answers
811
views
Cross-linguistic association between velarization and pharyngealization
Articulatorily, velarization and pharyngealization are distinct, but they are often conflated in linguistic analyses I've seen:
Conflating them is common enough, I presume, that the IPA allocates the ...
- 3,244
24
votes
2
answers
2k
views
Do onomatopoeias resist sound change?
Regular sound changes can of course affect phonemes used in onomatopoeias. For example, consider a language containing /mjaw/, referring to the call of a cat. Suppose that final /w/ is sound-changed ...
- 3,244
11
votes
4
answers
2k
views
How did the pitch-accent system of Western South Slavic emerge?
Uniquely among Slavic languages, and unusually among modern Indo-European languages, the Western South Slavic languages (Serbo-Croatian, and apparently some dialects of Slovenian) have a lexical pitch-...
- 3,244
7
votes
2
answers
243
views
What strategies for efficiency are adopted by languages with minimal phonemic inventories?
As the size of a phonemic inventory decreases, the information rate allowed by the inventory should likewise decrease. So are there any (semantico-)pragmatic or morphosyntactic strategies that ...
- 79
4
votes
1
answer
606
views
Is the concept of syllables pronunciation-relevant in languages with mora-based pronunciation?
Japanese pronunciation is mora-based (correct me if there is a better word), i.e. each mora is pronounced with equal length.
Still I sometimes see the concept of syllables used, e.g.
疲労 /hirō/ '...
- 1,554
5
votes
1
answer
419
views
Is the apico-labial trill a phoneme in any language?
As far as anyone here knows, are there any natural languages in which the apico-labial trill is a phoneme?
- 8,711
18
votes
1
answer
993
views
How do tone languages assign phonemic tones to loanwords from non-tone languages?
How do tone languages assign phonemic tones to loanwords from non-tone languages? For example, does such assignment vary according to the phonological context in each loanword? Alternatively, does ...
- 8,711
4
votes
1
answer
185
views
Are there any languages in which alternation between nasal and corresponding non-nasal vowels is used soley for grammatical purposes?
Are there any languages in which alternation between corresponding nasal and non-nasal vowels is used solely for grammatical purposes?
When I speak of two vowels that "correspond" in this context, ...
- 8,711
7
votes
1
answer
182
views
Do any languages have different syllable weight criteria for primary and secondary stress?
Some languages count the same syllable as "light" or "heavy" depending on the phonological process in question. For example, in Lhasa Tibetan, a CVC syllable ending in a sonorant is heavy for tone ...
5
votes
1
answer
477
views
Are certain phonological processes more likely to be surface true?
This question occurred to me when studying Optimality Theory phonology. For reduplication in OT, the base of the stem (/reduplicated part) is taken to be the input for the reduplicated morph. However, ...
user325
7
votes
1
answer
520
views
"oeuvre": foreign phonemes in a loanword
I recently came across oeuvre, which in the two out of two times I've heard the word spoken (in an English context), sounded like it does in Merriam-Webster's online audio pronunciation, that is, with ...
- 731
19
votes
7
answers
3k
views
What about the sound change initial n -> initial l?
While learning (a little) Cantonese, I was annoyed by the fact that every initial [n] was converted to [l], so that the word "you", written
néih hóu
in guidebooks is universally pronounced
léih ...
8
votes
1
answer
3k
views
Does the syllable/word ratio in a language determine the number of vowel phonemes it has?
I've recently stumbled on this site dedicated to teaching English as a second language to Portuguese speakers. Right at the beginning, while making a comparison among English and Portuguese ...
- 8,198
1
vote
2
answers
226
views
Velar vs labial coarticulation
Does anyone know of a citation for /k/ becoming palatal before a front vowel? Or anything that says labials are less likely than velars to become coarticulated with neighbouring vowels?
- 19
7
votes
3
answers
521
views
Rationale for diphthongs
What is the rationale for considering di-, tri- &co. -phthongs separate entities? Why aren't these sounds interpreted as sequences of a vowel and a glide? How would be linguistics deficient if ...
- 1,862
5
votes
3
answers
2k
views
How do languages that permit only CV and CCV syllables mark phonological word boundaries?
If a language permits only CV or CCV syllables, how does one tell where the phonological word boundaries are?
For example, suppose a language has a definite morpheme, /li/ that conveys what ...
- 8,711
4
votes
1
answer
427
views
Literature on "broken vowels"
I am looking for any recent studies dealing substantially with "broken vowels,"
or vocoid elements which have a noticeably nonstable formant trajectory, yet for which there are no good phonological ...
user483
9
votes
3
answers
4k
views
Definition(s) of phoneme
What different definitions of phoneme do you know?
Please note that I'm not asking for an explanation of what phoneme is but rather for professional definitions. I'm interested in how the issue is ...
- 1,862
21
votes
4
answers
4k
views
Where did Spanish get its /x/? Arabic influence?
Most Romance languages don't have /x/ (like the j in hijo), nor did Latin. Where did Spanish /x/ come from? Internal development, Arabic influence, or something else? Since Moroccan Arabic also has /x/...
- 7,956
2
votes
2
answers
768
views
What caused some IE languages to have consonant inventory sizes different from PIE?
The WALS chapter on consonant inventories shows that the distribution of inventory sizes across languages follows a normal curve, with average size inventories (22 ± 3 consonants) being the most ...
- 8,198
2
votes
1
answer
279
views
Do infants deliberately change the words when they omit the sounds and these words are minimal pairs?
While I was studying an infant's transcript, I realized that he deleted the [l] sound in "alma" [alma], a word in Turkish meaning "do not take". When he deleted the sound, the word became [a:ma]. ...
- 545
5
votes
1
answer
312
views
Are there any papers about the calling contour (minor third, vocative chant) in Italian?
As indicated in the answers to "Is it common to use the minor third for calling someone?", "many European languages" use this type of chanted falling contour, but the examples all come from English, ...
- 51
6
votes
1
answer
434
views
Cents symbol in phonology
In examining Chol's phonology, I came across the (old?) cents symbol ¢ (with a slanted line) as a phoneme symbol.
I have not been able to track what it corresponds to in IPA terms, but I suspect it's ...
- 163
7
votes
2
answers
270
views
Is voicing a gradient scale?
In one online linguistics community, I read the statement that "voicing is not all-or-nothing and that it is a gradient scale." This got me thinking: is this statement true or false? I guess it may be ...
- 183
12
votes
1
answer
424
views
Why do onsets not count for syllable weight in phonological processes?
Whether a syllable has a heavy or light rime is often important in whether it will participate in phonological processes, and whether it will receive stress. For example, in Latin, stress is on the ...
user325
17
votes
4
answers
941
views
Why do rhotics pattern together?
Looking at the IPA, many different types of sounds are given symbols based of of the Latin R,r: approximants, trills, taps/flaps; both coronal and uvular segments.
Sometimes, these sounds are ...
user325
10
votes
4
answers
1k
views
Is there a comprehensive account of the development of laryngeal theory?
The laryngeal theory proposes that Proto-Indo-European contained a number of consonants that are absent in (almost) all daughter languages. Their existence was proposed (by Saussure, under the term ...
user444
5
votes
2
answers
4k
views
Where does the term "segment" fit in in relation to "phone" and "phoneme"?
In a recent question seeking to clarify how diphthongs relate to phonemes, another term popped up in the comments, segment.
This made me wonder if "segment" is some kind of synonym for either "phone" ...
- 14.6k
11
votes
3
answers
14k
views
Is a diphthong one phoneme or two, or does it depend?
In Mitch's answer to "What is the difference between a diphthong and a glide?" and its comments it seems more than one of us is at least a bit confused as to how many phonemes a single diphthong ...
- 14.6k
12
votes
5
answers
15k
views
What is the difference between a diphthong and a glide?
It's easy for me to imagine the difference, but hard for me to conceptualize it. I guess one involves two vowels and the other involves a consonant, right? Am I on the right track, or is there a more ...
- 516
4
votes
2
answers
2k
views
What's going on when I hear people pronounce Georgian "ვ" like "w" instead of like "v" as it always seems to be defined?
The sixth letter of the Georgian alphabet is ვ and all the resources I have describe it as being like English v or IPA [v].
But especially in the common word ნახვამდის (goodbye) the ვ sounds a lot ...
- 14.6k
13
votes
2
answers
3k
views
Is the "principle of least effort" a real factor behind language change?
I have heard and read several times that one of the forces that drive language change is the so called "principle of least effort". According to this account, several changes are caused by an economy ...
- 8,198
17
votes
3
answers
2k
views
How did the Arabic word "allah" come to have an /lˤ/ ("emphatic l")?
In Modern Standard Arabic, phonemic /lˤ/ (a.k.a. "emphatic l") only occurs in one native word: Allah /ʔalˤˈlˤaːh/. (According to the linked article, it also occurs in a few loanwords.)
This seems ...
- 4,575
8
votes
2
answers
566
views
What evidence is there against "nonsegmental" phonology?
What's the best evidence against a position like that expounded by e.g. Bob Port (or Ken Lodge, for you UK-based phon*ists), which essentially states that phonology (or whatever you want to call the ...
- 501
7
votes
6
answers
2k
views
How exactly do the sounds of Arabic "ﻕ" and Georgian "ყ" differ?
The Arabic letter ﻕ and the Georgian letter ყ are often described as being similar, also they are both transliterated using q.
... the Georgian letter ყ is difficult for most Westerners to ...
- 14.6k
10
votes
1
answer
2k
views
Automatic/Computational Language Detection in Speech
Are there any packages that do much the same thing for audio/speech that the langid component/corpus of NLTK does for written text? The langid corpus/tool makes surprisingly accurate guesses about a ...
- 213
0
votes
4
answers
971
views
What is the term for how close a phonetic expression is to its meaning?
In some cases, the cognates of onomatopoetic sounds are highly similar even across unrelated languages. In these cases, the sounds of words seem to be an attempt to echo naturally occurring sounds. ...
- 1,315
26
votes
2
answers
1k
views
Is it common to use the minor third for calling someone?
In German, calling someone's two-syllable name is tied very strongly to the minor third.
In languages that like to have a stressed last syllable, I would expect the last syllable to be higher than ...
- 1,425
16
votes
2
answers
2k
views
How could one generate gibberish that mimics a specific language?
If given a list of languages the listener was able to understand or classify, how would you generate textual output using a standard phonetic alphabet, for example IPA, that would sound like a ...
- 1,315
7
votes
1
answer
409
views
How could the Sumerian cuneiform impose constraints on some languages?
It is said that the adoption of Sumerian cuneiform by Akkadian and other languages in the Middle East imposed constraints on those languages (due to the limited number of sounds represented in ...
- 8,451
10
votes
2
answers
2k
views
Why do languages have different syllable complexity from each other?
Assuming human vocal tracts are similar and equally capable of articulating different syllable structures, why is it that languages develop different syllable complexity? Why is it that it is not ...
- 8,451
7
votes
1
answer
618
views
How do you determine the phonemes in small phonemic inventories?
Languages with small phoneme inventories such as Pirahã often encourage different constructions of the phoneme system. In the case of Pirahã, it either lacks phonemic velars or phonemic nasals. Are ...
- 131
17
votes
3
answers
1k
views
Is it possible to predict language changes?
The comparative method is used to reconstruct unattested languages from the attested ones. By comparing different sounds for the same words in various sister languages, it is possible to infer some ...
- 8,198
6
votes
2
answers
2k
views
Is the "ll" in Albanian like the sounds in other languages?
Albanian has a digraph letter "ll" which is described as being similar to English "dark l".
But how similar is it and how different? My native Australian English has dark l and to me it tends to turn ...
- 14.6k
10
votes
7
answers
7k
views
Is the sound "ř" unique to Czech?
Czech has special sound which to me seems to be a voiced trilled r. It is written as "ř".
Wikipedia describes it a different way: A raised alveolar trill, and uses the IPA notation [r̝].
Czech ...
- 14.6k
9
votes
3
answers
10k
views
How to determine which phoneme a group of allophones realizes?
This question is related to this other one, about the difference between Phonetics and Phonology.
I can understand the difference between the two subfields as well as what it means to produce ...
- 8,198
69
votes
9
answers
114k
views
When should one use slashes or square brackets when transcribing in IPA?
When should one use /fubar/ and when [fubar] when transcribing in IPA? What are the differences?
- 8,451
8
votes
2
answers
6k
views
What is the primary phonological difference between dialects, vowels or consonants?
Not considering things like vocabulary or syntax (if that is possible), what phonological differences make the most telling distinction between two dialects, is it the vowels or the consonants?
...
- 4,445
15
votes
2
answers
2k
views
In Japanese, why do certain consonants change depending on the vowel?
I was wondering why in Japanese, certain consonants change depending on the vowel. For example:
Consonants that do not change:
ka / ki / ku / ke / ko
na / ni / nu / ne / no
Consonants that do ...
- 401