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A rather different perspective of the analysis of the st- cluster in English (though it does not, alas, mention moras). I would guess from the evidence that st- has been perceptually clustered for q …

Onomatopoeia is strictly about lexical imitation of sounds. Animal noises are a simple example. Ideophone is a term that refers only to a limited number of languages where it identifies some specia …

Phonemes and Phonology are localized to individual languages, whereas Phonetics is independent of individual language systems. … Phonology is all about the patterns that sounds fit into in a given language. In English, /h/ patterns as a consonant, and that's that. …

Phonological ambiguity is often the result of phonological change. Feet and feat are homonyms in Modern English, but they were pronounced differently in Middle English. The Great Vowel Shift merged bo …

Let's leave aside the definitional reading -- the dominance of unmarked terms is a consequence of what "unmarked term" means. If some phenomenon is dominant in a language (which is an empirical matter …

Basically, vowels are syllable nuclei, and consonants are syllable peripheries. Consonants are the sounds that don't occur in the middle of a syllable, and vowels are the ones that do. That's all, r …

The diphthongization of front and back mid vowels that's referred to here is an historical process moving from Classical Latin to Vulgar Latin to Castilian Spanish, over about a millennium. This is th …

English fire is not derived from Greek πυρ. Both fire and πυρ come originally from the Proto-Indo-European root *paəwr̥. Greek simplified the *aəw vowel sequence to /ū/, but kept the consonants. Proto …

A phonetician can probably give a better explanation, but I used to worry about this, too, and the conclusion I came to was that when you analyze any language, there's always a few consonants that cro …

Well, assuming that it went through the way the Grimms and their successors put it -- and not, for instance, the way the Glottalic Theory puts it -- Grimm's Law is a chain shift of three different con …

As for Semantics and Pragmatics, once you've gotten caught up in Logic, some good books are: Linguistic Semantics, by William Frawley. Study guide and Classes of entities. Metaphors We Live By, by L …

It came about like this. (Details about Greek here) When Greeks adopted the Punic abjad into an alphabet, they changed a lot of the letters, and added some new ones. The Punes hadn't needed vowel le …