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Minimal Pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate that two phones represent two separate phonemes in the language. Many phonologists in the middle part of the 20th century had a strong interest in developing techniques for discovering the phonemes of unknown languages, and in some cases, they set up writing systems for the languages. The major work of Kenneth Pike on the subject is ''Phonemics: a technique for reducing languages to writing''. The minimal pair was an essential tool in the discovery process and was found by substitution or commutation tests. As an example for English vowels, the pair "let" + "lit" can be used to demonstrate that the phones (in let) and (in lit) actually represent distinct phonemes and . An example for English consonants is the minimal pair of "pat" + ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phonology
Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' [''obsolescent''] 1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often preferred by the American Structuralists and reflecting the importance in structuralist work of phonemics in sense 1.": "phonematics ''n.'' 1. [''obsolete''] An old synonym for phonemics (sense 2).") is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phonemes or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but now it may relate to any Linguistic description, linguistic analysis either: Sign languages have a phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in spoken languages. The buil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geminate
In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from stress. Gemination is represented in many writing systems by a doubled letter and is often perceived as a doubling of the consonant.William Ham, ''Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Geminate Timing'', p. 1–18 Some phonological theories use 'doubling' as a synonym for gemination, while others describe two distinct phenomena. Consonant length is a distinctive feature in certain languages, such as Japanese. Other languages, such as Greek, do not have word-internal phonemic consonant geminates. Consonant gemination and vowel length are independent in languages like Arabic, Japanese, Hungarian, Malayalam, and Finnish; however, in languages like Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish, vowel length and consonant length are interdependent. Fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tuscan Dialect
Tuscan ( ; ) is a set of Italo-Dalmatian varieties of Romance spoken in Tuscany, Corsica, and Sardinia. Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, specifically on its Florentine dialect, and it became the language of culture throughout Italy because of the prestige of the works by Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini. It later became the official language of all of the historic Italian states and then of the Kingdom of Italy when it was formed. Subdialects In '' De vulgari eloquentia'' ( 1300), Dante Alighieri distinguishes four main subdialects: ''fiorentino'' (Florence), ''senese'' (Siena), ''lucchese'' (Lucca) and ''aretino'' (Arezzo). Tuscan is a dialect complex composed of many local variants, with minor differences among them. The main subdivisions are between Northern Tuscan dialects, the Southern Tuscan dialects and Corsican. The Northern Tuscan dialects are (from east to west): * Fiorentino, the main ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pronunciation
Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. To This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or all language in a specific dialect—"correct" or "standard" pronunciation—or simply the way a particular individual speaks a word or language. Words' pronunciations can be found in reference works such as dictionaries. General-purpose dictionaries typically only include standard pronunciations, but regional or dialectal pronunciations may be found in more specific works. Orthoepy is the study of the pronunciation of a language. A word can be spoken in different ways by various individuals or groups, depending on many factors, such as: the duration of the cultural exposure of their childhood, the location of their current residence, speech or voice disorders, their ethnic group, their social class, or their education. Linguistic terminology Syllables are combinations of units of sound ( phones), for example "goo" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diacritical Mark
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacritic'' is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas ''diacritical'' is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute , grave , and circumflex (all shown above an 'o'), are often called ''accents''. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters. The main use of diacritics in Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. Historically, English has used the diaeresis diacritic to indicate the correct pronunciation of ambiguous words, such as "coöperate", without which the letter sequence could be misinterpreted to be pronounced . Other examples are the acute and grave accents, which can indicate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Accent (phonetics)
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or Sentence (linguistics), sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in Tone (linguistics), tone. The terms ''stress'' and ''accent'' are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called ''Pitch-accent language, pitch accent'', and when produced through length alone, it is called ''quantitative accent''. When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called ''stress accent'' or ''dynamic accent''; English uses what is called ''variable stress accent''. Since stress can be realised through a wide range of Phonetics, phonetic properties, such as loudness, vowel length, and pitch (which are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sandhi
Sandhi ( ; , ) is any of a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on nearby sounds or the grammatical function of the adjacent words. Sandhi belongs to morphophonology. Sandhi occurs in many languages, e.g. in the phonology of Indian languages (especially Sanskrit, Tamil, Sinhala, Telugu, Marathi, Hindi, Pali, Kannada, Bengali, Assamese and Malayalam). Many dialects of British English show linking and intrusive R. A subset of sandhi called tone sandhi more specifically refers to tone changes between words and syllables. This is a common feature of many tonal languages such as Burmese and Chinese. Types Internal and external sandhi Sandhi can be either: * internal, at morpheme boundaries within words, such as ''syn- + pathy'': ''sympathy'', or * external, at word boundaries, such as the pronunciation "''tem books''" for ''ten books' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syntactic Gemination
Syntactic gemination, or syntactic doubling, is an external sandhi phenomenon in Italian, other Romance languages spoken in Italy, and Finnish. It consists in the lengthening (gemination) of the initial consonant in certain contexts. It may also be called word-initial gemination or phonosyntactic consonantal gemination. In Italian it is called ''raddoppiamento sintattico (RS), raddoppiamento fonosintattico (RF), raddoppiamento iniziale,'' or ''rafforzamento iniziale (della consonante).'' Italian "Syntactic" means that gemination spans word boundaries, as opposed to word-internal geminate consonants as in "cat" or "year". In standard Italian, syntactic doubling occurs after the following words (with exceptions described below): *all stressed ("strong") monosyllables (''monosillabi forti'') and some unstressed ("weak") monosyllables (''monosillabi deboli''): ''a'', ''blu'', ''che'', ''ché'', ''chi'', ''ciò'', ''da'', ''dà'', ''dì'', ''do'', ''e'', ''è'', ''fa'', ''fra'', ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prosodic Unit
In linguistics, a prosodic unit is a segment of speech that occurs with specific prosodic properties. These properties can be those of stress, intonation (a single pitch and rhythm contour), or tonal patterns. Prosodic units occur at a hierarchy of levels, from the syllable, the metrical foot and phonological word to the intonational unit (IU) and to a complete utterance. However, the term is often restricted to intermediate levels which do not have a dedicated terminology. Prosodic units do not generally correspond to syntactic units, such as phrases and clauses; it is thought that they reflect different aspects of how the brain processes speech, with prosodic units being generated through on-line interaction and processing, and with morphosyntactic units being more automated. Defining characteristics Prosodic units are characterized by several phonetic cues, such as pitch movement, pre-boundary lengthening, and pauses. Breathing, both inhalation and exhalation, only occ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palmi, Calabria
Palmi (; ; ) is a ''comune'' (municipality) of about 19,303 inhabitants in the province of Reggio Calabria in Calabria. It is seat of the district, which includes 33 municipalities in the plain of Gioia Tauro, with a population of approximately 170,000 inhabitants. With the nearby beaches of Marina di Palmi and Lido di Palmi, overlooking the Violet coast, the city is a major seaside resort thanks to its landscape, which has led writers and poets to call it the "terrace on the Strait of Messina". In addition to being the main administrative center, office and school of the Tyrrhenian Sea, Tyrrhenian coast of the province of Reggio Calabria, Palmi was also an important agricultural and commercial center and a bishopric of Roman Catholic Diocese of Oppido Mamertina-Palmi. For centuries, the city was one of the most important cultural centers of Calabria in the literary, musical, historical and archaeological interest. Notable people from the area include, among others, the compos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thai Language
Thai,In or Central Thai (historically Siamese;Although "Thai" and "Central Thai" have become more common, the older term, "Siamese", is still used by linguists, especially when it is being distinguished from other Tai languages (Diller 2008:6). "Proto-Thai" is, for example, the ancestor of all of Southwestern Tai, not just Siamese (Rischel 1998). ), is a Tai language of the Kra–Dai language family spoken by the Central Thai, Mon, Lao Wiang, Phuan people in Central Thailand and the vast majority of Thai Chinese enclaves throughout the country. It is the sole official language of Thailand. Thai is the most spoken of over 60 languages of Thailand by both number of native and overall speakers. Over half of its vocabulary is derived from or borrowed from Pali, Sanskrit, Mon and Old Khmer. It is a tonal and analytic language. Thai has a complex orthography and system of relational markers. Spoken Thai, depending on standard sociolinguistic factors such as age, gender ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uralic Languages
The Uralic languages ( ), sometimes called the Uralian languages ( ), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers above 100,000 are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi spoken in the European parts of the Russian Federation. Still smaller minority languages are Sámi languages of the northern Fennoscandia; other members of the Finnic languages, ranging from Livonian in northern Latvia to Karelian in northwesternmost Russia; the Samoyedic languages and the others of members of the Ugric languages, Mansi and Khanty spoken in Western Siberia. The name ''Uralic'' derives from the family's purported "original homeland" (''Urheimat'') hypothesized to have been somewhere in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, and was first proposed by Julius Klaproth in ''Asia Polyglotta'' (1823). Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic but more accu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
