Questions tagged [phonology]
The study of the abstract aspect of the sounds or *phonemes* in a given language.
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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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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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/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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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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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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/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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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What does @ mean? [closed]
What does “@“ sign mean in phonology or historical linguistics?
I saw “*@” in the context of restriction.
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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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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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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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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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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 ...
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How languages compare with the number of different syllables from all words?
Note: I am not a linguist, please provide any corrections for terminology.
I would like to find some approximate data (if it exists) comparing several languages with the number of different syllables ...
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Why are there languages that distinguish between /j/ and /i/?
Both phonemes sound practically the same, so it's understandable that there are languages such as Spanish and Italian in which /j/ shares grapheme with /i/ in diphthongs. That is, in these and other ...
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What is a markedness constraint in Optimality Theory?
Here is my answer but I'm not sure whether it is correct or put in a formal way. Could you help me see this?
Markedness constraints allow the markedness of a feature based on universal principles of ...
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Data analysis of æ (tense) and æ: (lax) (Lexical Phonology)
I am struggling with performing a phonological analysis (within the framework of Lexical Phonology) on the following data.
In an unspecified English dialect, the distribution of the vowels æ (tense) ...
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Some questions about counterbleeding
Here are two words, "writing" and "riding". I know that there are two rules for them, as in the pictures. But in the first picture, can I say the /ai/ raising rule counterbleeds ...
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What are the phonological rules or constraints for these pairs of words?
Mongol-Mongolia
Arab-Arabia
Babylon-Babylonian
Boston-Bostonian
comedy-comedian
colony-colonial
I know that the vowel in the second syllable is lengthened, but what are the rules or constraints for ...
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Is there evidence for accentuation in Classical Arabic?
Wright's A grammar of the Arabic language lays out claims for where the stress should be in §§28-31. Most of the claims are connectable (in my experience) to contemporary renditions of Classical ...
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Does anyone actually use /æ/ as an emphatic article?
In the movie "Wayne's World" (1992), Mike Myers's character (the titular Wayne) says "I don't even own æ gun, let alone many guns that would necessitate an entire rack." To my ears ...
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A question about Optimality Theory
Here is a line, "The optimal output in OT need not be the ideal candidate in the sense of complying with all the constraints." (quoted from Roca and Johnson (1999:656). I really feel ...
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What are the similarities between rule-based phonological theory and Optimality Theory?
The only similarity is that they both involve the underlying form and surface form right?
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Is a final -u in Semitic languages known outside of Akkadian?
Consider Akkadian bētu vs. Hebrew bayit (בַּיִת) (meaning "house") and Akkadian daltu vs. Hebrew delet (דֶּלֶת) (meaning "door"). Are these endings known outside of Akkadian? If so, when did they ...
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Speakers of a foreign language in a nation sounding similar in 'mispronunciations'
For pronunciation of a foreign language, do foreign speakers from a certain country speak with the same accent because they learn in their country from someone with that accent, or their native ...
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Aspiration of p, t, k in English
I'm trying to figure out when exactly p, t, k should be aspirated in (American) English.
Here's what I found here:
Voiceless stops are aspirated at the beginning of a word, and at the beginning ...
user31981
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Resource for finding languages that contain certain phonemes [duplicate]
In particular /w~b/ or other sounds that could be transcribed as <w> or <b>.
Background: A person gave his name variously as 'John Barosa' or 'John Warosa' in writing from which I figured ...
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According to the Elsewhere Principle, can a syntactic rule block a morphological one, or a morphological rule a phonological one?
I read up on the Elsewhere Principle. In the linked article two examples are given:
The syntactic comparative "more + adjective" can be overruled by the morphological comparative "adjective+er" for (...
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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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Looking for references about the orthographic transparency
I need to have two tables as showing both grapheme-phoneme and phoneme-grapheme relationships in a couple of languages to be compared mathematically. In fact, I want to know how many phonemes stand ...
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Is there a name for when a 'c' becomes an [s] sound in words like rusticity, when originally it was a 'c' in rustiC?
I know it's a sound change, but is there a specific name for it? It's for an assignment I'm writing on the phonological transparency of the suffix -ity.
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