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Shuangfeng Dialect
The Shuangfeng dialect () is a dialect of Xiang Chinese, spoken in Shuangfeng County, Hunan province, China. Phonology Consonants Vowels Tones Phonemically, Shuangfeng dialect has three tones. Phonetically, however, the pitch of a syllable depends on the voicing of the initial consonant so the tones are counted as five: See also * Xiang Chinese * List of Chinese dialects References *Běijīng dàxué zhōngguó yǔyán wénxué xì yǔyán xué jiàoyánshì. (1989) H''ànyǔ fāngyīn zìhuì''. Běijīng: Wénzì gǎigé chūbǎn shè.(北京大學中國語言文學系語言學教研室. 1989. 漢語方音字匯. 北京: 文字改革出版社) *Coblin, W. South. (2011). Comparative Phonology of the Central Xiāng Dialects. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica. * Norman, Jerry. 988 Year 988 ( CMLXXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * Fall & ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
People's Republic Of China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and borders fourteen countries by land, the most of any country in the world, tied with Russia. Covering an area of approximately , it is the world's third largest country by total land area. The country consists of 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities, and two Special Administrative Regions (Hong Kong and Macau). The national capital is Beijing, and the most populous city and financial center is Shanghai. Modern Chinese trace their origins to a cradle of civilization in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. The semi-legendary Xia dynasty in the 21st century BCE and the well-attested Shang and Zhou dynasties developed a bureaucratic political system to serve hereditary monarchies, or dyna ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plosives
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips (, ), or glottis (). Plosives contrast with nasals, where the vocal tract is blocked but airflow continues through the nose, as in and , and with fricatives, where partial occlusion impedes but does not block airflow in the vocal tract. Terminology The terms ''stop, occlusive,'' and ''plosive'' are often used interchangeably. Linguists who distinguish them may not agree on the distinction being made. The terms refer to different features of the consonant. "Stop" refers to the airflow that is stopped. "Occlusive" refers to the articulation, which occludes (blocks) the vocal tract. "Plosive" refers to the release burst (plosion) of the consonant. Some object to the use of "plosive" for inaudibly released stops, which may then instead be ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of Chinese Dialects
The following is a list of Sinitic languages and their dialects. For a traditional dialectological overview, see also varieties of Chinese. Classification 'Chinese' is a blanket term covering the many different varieties spoken across China. Mandarin Chinese is the most popular dialect, and is used as a lingua franca across China. Linguists classify these varieties as the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Within this broad classification, there are between seven and fourteen dialect groups, depending on the classification. The conventionally accepted set of seven dialect groups first appeared in the second edition of the dialectology handbook edited by Yuan Jiahua (1961). In order of decreasing number of speakers, they are: # Guan (including Beijing and Nanjing variants) # Wu (including the Shanghainese and Suzhounese variants) # Yue (including the Cantonese and Taishanese variants) # Min (including the Hokkien and Fuzhounese variants) # Hakka (Kejia) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tone Contour
A tone contour, or contour tone, is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, Khoisan languages, Oto-Manguean languages and some languages of South America. Contours When the pitch descends, the contour is called a ''falling tone;'' when it ascends, a ''rising tone;'' when it descends and then returns, a ''dipping'' or ''falling-rising tone;'' and when it ascends and then returns, it is called a ''peaking'' or ''rising-falling tone.'' A tone in a contour-tone language which remains at approximately an even pitch is called a ''level tone.'' Tones which are too short to exhibit much of a contour, typically because of a final plosive consonant, may be called '' checked, abrupt, clipped,'' or ''stopped tones.'' It has been theorized that the relative timing of a contour tone is not distinctive. That is, in some accents or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tone Name
In tonal languages, tone names are the names given to the tones these languages use. *In contemporary standard Chinese (Mandarin), the tones are numbered from 1 to 4. They are descended from but not identical to the historical four tones of Middle Chinese, namely ''level'' (), ''rising'' (), ''departing'' (), and '' entering'' (), each split into ''yin'' () and ''yang'' () registers, and the categories of ''high'' and ''low'' syllables. * Standard Vietnamese has six tones, known as ngang, sắc, huyền, hỏi, ngã, and nặng tones. * Thai has five phonemic tones: mid, low, falling, high and rising, sometimes referred to in older reference works as rectus, gravis, circumflexus, altus and demissus, respectively.Frankfurter, Oscar. Elements of Siamese grammar with appendices. American Presbyterian mission press, 190(Full text available on Google Books) The table shows an example of both the phoneme, phonemic tones and their phonetic realization, in the IPA. See also *Tone ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syllabic Consonant
A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''bottle''. To represent it, the understroke diacritic in the International Phonetic Alphabet is used, . It may be instead represented by an overstroke, if the symbol that it modifies has a descender, such as in . Syllabic consonants in most languages are sonorants, such as nasals and liquids. Very few have syllabic obstruents, such as stops and fricatives in normal words, but English has syllabic fricatives in paralinguistic words like ''shh!'' and ''zzz''. Examples Germanic languages In many varieties of High and Low German, pronouncing syllabic consonants may be considered a shibboleth. In High German and Tweants (a Low Saxon dialect spoken in the Netherlands; more Low Saxon dialects have the syllabic consonant), all word-final syllables in infinite verbs and feminine plural noun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress. The word ''vowel'' comes from the Latin word , meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice). In English, the word ''vowel'' is commonly used to refer both to vowel sounds and to the written symbols that represent them (a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y). Definition There are two complementary definitions of vowel, one phonetic and the other phonological. *In the phonetic definition, a vowel is a sound, such as the English "ah" or "oh" , produced with an open vocal tract; it is median (the air escapes along the middle of the tongue), oral (at least some of the airflow must escape through the mouth), frictionless and continuant ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Approximant Consonant
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no turbulence. This class is composed of sounds like (as in ''rest'') and semivowels like and (as in ''yes'' and ''west'', respectively), as well as lateral approximants like (as in ''less''). Terminology Before Peter Ladefoged coined the term "approximant" in the 1960s, the terms "frictionless continuant" and "semivowel" were used to refer to non-lateral approximants. In phonology, "approximant" is also a distinctive feature that encompasses all sonorants except nasals, including vowels, taps and trills. Semivowels Some approximants resemble vowels in acoustic and articulatory properties and the terms ''semivowel'' and ''glide'' are often used for these non-syllabic vowel-like segme ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lateral Consonant
A lateral is a consonant in which the airstream proceeds along one or both of the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. An example of a lateral consonant is the English ''L'', as in ''Larry''. Lateral consonants contrast with central consonants, in which the airstream flows through the center of the mouth. For the most common laterals, the tip of the tongue makes contact with the upper teeth (see dental consonant) or the upper gum (see alveolar consonant), but there are many other possible places for laterals to be made. The most common laterals are approximant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a ...s and belong to the class of liquid consonant, liquids, but lateral fricative consonant, fricatives and affricate co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Affricate Consonant
An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. English has two affricate phonemes, and , often spelled ''ch'' and ''j'', respectively. Examples The English sounds spelled "ch" and "j" ( broadly transcribed as and in the IPA), German and Italian ''z'' and Italian ''z'' are typical affricates, and sounds like these are fairly common in the world's languages, as are other affricates with similar sounds, such as those in Polish and Chinese. However, voiced affricates other than are relatively uncommon. For several places of articulation they are not attested at all. Much less common are labiodental affricates, such as in German and Izi, or velar affricates, such as in Tswana (written ''kg'') or in High Alemannic Swiss German dialects. Worldwide, relatively few languages have af ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fricative Consonant
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in the case of German (the final consonant of ''Bach''); or the side of the tongue against the molars, in the case of Welsh (appearing twice in the name ''Llanelli''). This turbulent airflow is called frication. A particular subset of fricatives are the sibilants. When forming a sibilant, one still is forcing air through a narrow channel, but in addition, the tongue is curled lengthwise to direct the air over the edge of the teeth. English , , , and are examples of sibilants. The usage of two other terms is less standardized: "Spirant" is an older term for fricatives used by some American and European phoneticians and phonologists. "Strident" could mean just "sibilant", but some authors include also labiodental and uvular fricatives in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aspiration (phonetics)
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breathing, breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the Stop consonant#articulation, closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution#In phonology, complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most Languages of South Asia, South Asian languages (including Languages of India, Indian) and East Asian languages, the difference is Contrastive distribution#Phonology, contrastive. In dialects with aspiration, to feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say ''spin'' and then ''pin'' . One should either feel a puff of air or see a flicker of the candle flame with ''pin'' that one does not get with ''spin''. Transcription In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), aspirated consonants are written usi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
