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The study of the abstract aspect of the sounds or *phonemes* in a given language.

5 votes

Sanskrit consonant clusters

This book seems to answer your question in great detail. From the Amazon description: This scholarly treatise designed for linguists and typographers contains comprehensive statistics of conjunct con …
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1 vote
2 answers
390 views

Has any Indic language spirantized its voiceless aspirates? If not, why not?

Many or most Indic languages possess voiceless aspirated stops. Cross-linguistically, such stops often turn into fricatives: e.g., in Indo-European, this happened in Greek, in Iranian, and probably in …
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8 votes

Solution to a typological problem about PIE phonology: are there any facts that contradict t...

This proposal creates a lot more problems than it solves. First, I don't think the rarity of the biphonemic sequence /kw/ is that problematic: plain velars are relatively infrequent in any case, so it …
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1 vote
1 answer
2k views

How do phonologists use the terms "phonological phrase" and "intonational phrase"?

I would like to get a handle on the difference between the concepts of phonological phrase and intonational phrase, as used in contemporary phonological theory. How do phonologists define these two te …
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6 votes
Accepted

What were allophone rules for [r] in Old English and Middle English?

There's no certain answer to this question, as the various realizations of /r/ in OE/ME (and in early Germanic languages generally) are far from straightforwardly clear. A good recent article by Piotr …
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2 votes

Are there languages in which lexical pitch accent and phonemic vowel length vary independently?

Ancient Greek appears to have been such a language. Although of course we can't know the exact phonetic correlates of accent in a dead language, it's thought to have been a pitch-accent language, and …
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3 votes

Glottal stops that aren't tenuis

This cites an article by Bessell (1992) arguing that Nlakapmxcin, a Northwest Coast language, has allophonically aspirated glottal stops. Tinputz, a language of Papue New Guinea, is claimed here to h …
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4 votes
Accepted

Labialisation and palatisation in IPA: one consonant or two phones?

Deciding between a cluster analysis and a coarticulation analysis when the two do not phonemically contrast is always to some extent a matter of analytical choice, so there's no general answer to your …
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5 votes
Accepted

When did the vocalic allophones of the consonant phonemes in PIE become independent vowel ph...

Phonemes are a theoretical construct, so the answer will depend to some extent on one's theoretical preferences; note that even for PIE many scholars posit independent vowel phonemes /i u/. But basica …
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2 votes
Accepted

What might explain the loss of -l- from Latin to Old French?

It is dissimilation, or more specifically loss by dissimilation. There are two [l] sounds in the word originally, and one of them dissimilates to zero, i.e. is lost. This is a common type of sound cha …
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8 votes
4 answers
361 views

Place feature metathesis

Familiar cases of metathesis involve segments changing places, but metathesis can also operate at the subsegmental level, affecting individual features. I'm specifically interested in metathesis of PO …
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3 votes

Why do so many English nouns have a Consonant-Vowel-Nasal ending?

English words in -tion/-sion are nouns because this suffix comes from Latin, where it was a productive way of forming action nouns. Some of these English nouns are borrowings directly from Latin, but …
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3 votes
Accepted

what would be the hypothetic result of *βεβλεπνται in Ancient Greek?

It would be βεβλέπαται. The [n] between consonants would be syllabic, and syllabic [n] went to [a] in Greek. This is the origin of the -αται 3pl. ending in the forms you mention, and also of 3pl. -ατο …
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8 votes
Accepted

Phonology vs phonetics : /ʁɔz/ vs [ʁoz]

Although /ɔ/ and /o/ do contrast in certain positions in French, the distinction is neutralized before /z/, where phonetically it's always the high-mid vowel that appears: [oz] but never [ɔz]. So it's …
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6 votes
Accepted

What is the approximate time of the loss of the intervocalic /s/ in Greek?

The loss of intervocalic s is one of the defining features of Proto-Greek: that is, it occurred before the earliest attested Greek and is common to all the Greek dialects. It is thought to have gone t …
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