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Devoicing
In phonology, voicing (or sonorization) is a sound change where a voiceless consonant becomes voiced due to the influence of its phonological environment; shift in the opposite direction is referred to as devoicing or desonorization. Most commonly, the change is a result of sound assimilation with an adjacent sound of opposite voicing, but it can also occur word-finally or in contact with a specific vowel. For example, the English suffix ''-s'' is pronounced when it follows a voiceless phoneme (''cats''), and when it follows a voiced phoneme (''dogs''). This type of assimilation is called ''progressive'', where the second consonant assimilates to the first; ''regressive'' assimilation goes in the opposite direction, as can be seen in ''have to'' . English English no longer has a productive process of voicing stem-final fricatives when forming noun-verb pairs or plural nouns, but there are still examples of voicing from earlier in the history of English: * belief () – beli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allophony
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''stop'' ) and the aspirated form (as in ''top'' ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Thai. On the other hand, in Spanish, (as in ''dolor'' ) and (as in ''nada'' ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English. The specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, with such allophones being called positional variants, but some allophones occur in free variation. Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme usually does not change the meaning of a word, but the result may sound non-native or even unintelligible. Native speakers of a given language ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voice (phonetics)
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts: *Voicing can refer to the ''articulatory process'' in which the vocal folds vibrate, its primary use in phonetics to describe phones, which are particular speech sounds. *It can also refer to a classification of speech sounds that tend to be associated with vocal cord vibration but may not actually be voiced at the articulatory level. That is the term's primary use in phonology: to describe phonemes; while in phonetics its primary use is to describe phones. For example, voicing accounts for the difference between the pair of sounds associated with the English letters "s" and "z". The two sounds are transcribed as and to distinguish them from the English letters, which have several possible pronunciations, depe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dutch Language
Dutch ( ) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives German and English. ''Afrikaans'' is a separate but somewhat mutually intelligible daughter languageAfrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch; see , , , , , . Afrikaans was historically called Cape Dutch; see , , , , , . Afrikaans is rooted in 17th-century dialects of Dutch; see , , , . Afrikaans is variously described as a creole, a partially creolised language, or a deviant variety of Dutch; see . spoken, to some degree, by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia, evolving from the Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa. The dialects used in Belgium (including Flemish) and in Suriname, meanwhile, are all guided by the Dutch Language Union. In Europe, most of the population of the Netherlands (where it is the only official language spoken country ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polish Language
Polish (Polish: ''język polski'', , ''polszczyzna'' or simply ''polski'', ) is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic group written in the Latin script. It is spoken primarily in Poland and serves as the native language of the Poles. In addition to being the official language of Poland, it is also used by the Polish diaspora. There are over 50 million Polish speakers around the world. It ranks as the sixth most-spoken among languages of the European Union. Polish is subdivided into regional dialects and maintains strict T–V distinction pronouns, honorifics, and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals. The traditional 32-letter Polish alphabet has nine additions (''ą'', ''ć'', ''ę'', ''ł'', ''ń'', ''ó'', ''ś'', ''ź'', ''ż'') to the letters of the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet, while removing three (x, q, v). Those three letters are at times included in an extended 35-letter alphabet, although they are not used in native words. The traditional ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Catalan Language
Catalan (; autonym: , ), known in the Valencian Community and Carche as ''Valencian'' (autonym: ), is a Western Romance language. It is the official language of Andorra, and an official language of three autonomous communities in eastern Spain: Catalonia, the Valencian Community, and the Balearic Islands. It also has semi-official status in the Italian comune of Alghero. It is also spoken in the Pyrénées-Orientales department of France and in two further areas in eastern Spain: the eastern strip of Aragon and the Carche area in the Region of Murcia. The Catalan-speaking territories are often called the or "Catalan Countries". The language evolved from Vulgar Latin in the Middle Ages around the eastern Pyrenees. Nineteenth-century Spain saw a Catalan literary revival, culminating in the early 1900s. Etymology and pronunciation The word ''Catalan'' is derived from the territorial name of Catalonia, itself of disputed etymology. The main theory suggests that (Latin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lenition
In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonority hierarchy, sonorous. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronic analysis, synchronically (within a language at a particular point in time) and historical linguistics, diachronically (as a evolutionary linguistics, language changes over time). Lenition can involve such changes as Voice (phonetics), voicing a voiceless consonant, causing a consonant to relax Occlusive, occlusion, to lose its place of articulation (a phenomenon called ''debuccalization'', which turns a consonant into a glottal consonant like or ), or even causing a consonant to disappear entirely. An example of synchronic lenition is found in most varieties of American English, in the form of flapping: the of a word like ''wait'' is pronounced as the more sonorous in the related form ''waiting'' . Some varieties of Spanish language, Spanish show ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sound Assimilation
Assimilation is a sound change in which some phonemes (typically consonants or vowels) change to become more similar to other nearby sounds. A common type of phonological process across languages, assimilation can occur either within a word or between words. It occurs in normal speech but becomes more common in more rapid speech. In some cases, assimilation causes the sound spoken to differ from the normal pronunciation in isolation, such as the prefix ''in-'' of English ''input'' pronounced with phonetic rather than In other cases, the change is accepted as canonical for that word or phrase, especially if it is recognized in standard spelling: ''implant'' pronounced with composed historically of ''in'' + ''plant''. English "handbag" (canonically ) is often pronounced in rapid speech because the and sounds are both bilabial consonants, and their places of articulation are similar. However, the sequence - has different places but similar manner of articulation (voice ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Plural
English nouns are inflected for grammatical number, meaning that, if they are of the countable type, they generally have different forms for singular and plural. This article discusses the variety of ways in which English plural nouns are formed from the corresponding singular forms, as well as various issues concerning the usage of singulars and plurals in English. For plurals of pronouns, see English personal pronouns. Phonological transcriptions provided in this article are for Received Pronunciation and General American. For more information, see English phonology. Meaning Although the everyday meaning of ''plural'' is "more than one", the grammatical term has a slightly different technical meaning. In the English system of grammatical number, singular means "one (or minus one)", and plural means "not singular". In other words, plural means not just "more than one" but also "less than one". This less-than aspect can be seen in cases like ''the temperature is zero degrees'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Assimilation (linguistics)
Assimilation is a sound change in which some phonemes (typically consonants or vowels) change to become more similar to other nearby sounds. A common type of phonological process across languages, assimilation can occur either within a word or between words. It occurs in normal speech but becomes more common in more connected speech, rapid speech. In some cases, assimilation causes the sound spoken to differ from the normal pronunciation in isolation, such as the prefix ''in-'' of English ''input'' pronounced with phonetic [m] rather than [n]. In other cases, the change is accepted as canonical for that word or phrase, especially if it is recognized in standard spelling: ''implant'' pronounced with [m], composed historically of ''in'' + ''plant''. English "handbag" (canonically ) is often pronounced in rapid speech because the and sounds are both bilabial consonants, and their places of articulation are similar. However, the sequence - has different places but similar man ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Obstruent
An obstruent () is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well as consonants. Subclasses Obstruents are subdivided into plosives (oral stops), such as , with complete occlusion of the vocal tract, often followed by a release burst; fricatives, such as , with limited closure, not stopping airflow but making it turbulent; and affricates, which begin with complete occlusion but then release into a fricative-like release, such as .Zsiga, Elizabeth. ''The Sounds of Language: An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology''. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Voicing Obstruents are often prototypically voiceless, but voiced obstruents are common. This contrasts with sonorants, which are prototypically voiced and only rarely voiceless. See also *List of phonetics topics A * Acoustic phonetics * Active articulato ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Italian Language
Italian (''italiano'' or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Together with Sardinian, Italian is the least divergent language from Latin. Spoken by about 85 million people (2022), Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland (Ticino and the Grisons), San Marino, and Vatican City. It has an official minority status in western Istria (Croatia and Slovenia). Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia.Ethnologue report for language code:ita (Italy) – Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version Itali ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
German Language
German ( ) is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and Official language, official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italy, Italian province of South Tyrol. It is also a co-official language of Luxembourg and German-speaking Community of Belgium, Belgium, as well as a national language in Namibia. Outside Germany, it is also spoken by German communities in France (Bas-Rhin), Czech Republic (North Bohemia), Poland (Upper Silesia), Slovakia (Bratislava Region), and Hungary (Sopron). German is most similar to other languages within the West Germanic language branch, including Afrikaans, Dutch language, Dutch, English language, English, the Frisian languages, Low German, Luxembourgish, Scots language, Scots, and Yiddish. It also contains close similarities in vocabulary to some languages in the North Germanic languages, North Germanic group, such as Danish lan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
