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Phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west of England, the sound patterns (''sin'') and (''sing'') are two separate words that are distinguished by the substitution of one phoneme, , for another phoneme, . Two words like this that differ in meaning through the contrast of a single phoneme form a '' minimal pair''. If, in another language, any two sequences differing only by pronunciation of the final sounds or are perceived as being the same in meaning, then these two sounds are interpreted as phonetic variants of a single phoneme in that language. Phonemes that are established by the use of minimal pairs, such as ''tap'' vs ''tab'' or ''pat'' vs ''bat'', are written between slashes: , . To show pronunciation, linguists use square brackets: (indicating an aspirated ''p'' i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds 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 may now relate to any linguistic analysis either: Sign languages have a phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in spoken languages. The building blocks of signs are specifications for movement, location, and handshape. At first, a separate terminology was used for the study of sign phonology ('chereme' instead of 'phoneme', etc.), but the concepts are now considered to apply universally to all human languages. Terminology The word 'phonology' (as in ' phonology of English') can refer either to the field of study or to the phonological system of a given language. This is one ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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] |
Allophone
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 langu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of methods, including spoken, sign, and written language. Many languages, including the most widely-spoken ones, have writing systems that enable sounds or signs to be recorded for later reactivation. Human language is highly variable between cultures and across time. Human languages have the properties of productivity and displacement, and rely on social convention and learning. Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between and . Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction (dichotomy) established between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken, signed, or both; however, any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, writ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allophones
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 langu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form.International Phonetic Association (IPA), ''Handbook''. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators. The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of lexical (and, to a limited extent, prosodic) sounds in oral language: phones, phonemes, intonation, and the separation of words and syllables. To represent additional qualities of speech—such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft lip and cleft palate—an extended set of symbols may be used. Segments are transcribed by one or more IPA symbols of two basic types ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
X-SAMPA
The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the 1993 version of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The result is a SAMPA-inspired remapping of the IPA into 7-bit ASCII. SAMPA was devised as a hack to work around the inability of text encodings to represent IPA symbols. Later, as Unicode support for IPA symbols became more widespread, the necessity for a separate, computer-readable system for representing the IPA in ASCII decreased. However, X-SAMPA is still useful as the basis for an input method for true IPA. Summary Notes * The IPA symbols that are ordinary lower case letters have the same value in X-SAMPA as they do in the IPA. * X-SAMPA uses backslashes as modifying suffixes to create new symbols. For example ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phone (phonetics)
In phonetics and linguistics, a phone is any distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words. In contrast, a phoneme is a speech sound in a given language that, if swapped with another phoneme, could change one word to another. Phones are absolute and are not specific to any language, but phonemes can be discussed only in reference to specific languages. For example, the English words ''kid'' and ''kit'' end with two distinct phonemes, and , and swapping one for the other would change one word into a different word. However, the difference between the sounds in ''pun'' (, with aspiration) and ''spun'' (, without aspiration) never affects the meaning or identity of a word in English. Therefore, cannot be replaced with (or vice versa) and thereby convert one word to another. That causes and to be two distinct phones but not distinct phonemes in English. In contrast to English, swapping the same two sounds in Hindu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grapheme
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called '' graphemics''. The concept of graphemes is abstract and similar to the notion in computing of a character. By comparison, a specific shape that represents any particular grapheme in a given typeface is called a glyph. Conceptualization There are two main opposing grapheme concepts. In the so-called ''referential conception'', graphemes are interpreted as the smallest units of writing that correspond with sounds (more accurately phonemes). In this concept, the ''sh'' in the written English word ''shake'' would be a grapheme because it represents the phoneme /ʃ/. This referential concept is linked to the ''dependency hypothesis'' that claims that writing merely depicts speech. By contrast, the ''analogical concept'' defines graphemes analogou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
West Midlands (region)
The West Midlands is one of nine official regions of England at the first level of International Territorial Level for statistical purposes. It covers the western half of the area traditionally known as the Midlands. The region consists of the counties of Herefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, West Midlands and Worcestershire. The region has seven cities; Birmingham, Coventry, Hereford, Lichfield, Stoke-on-Trent, Wolverhampton and Worcester. The West Midlands region is geographically diverse, from the urban central areas of the West Midlands conurbation to the rural counties of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire which border Wales. The region is landlocked. However, the longest river in the UK, the River Severn, traverses the region southeastwards, flowing through the county towns of Shrewsbury and Worcester, and the Ironbridge Gorge, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Staffordshire is home to the industrialised Potteries conurbation, including ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voiceless Bilabial Stop
The voiceless bilabial plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in most spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is p. Features Features of the voiceless bilabial stop: Varieties Occurrence The stop is missing from about 10% of languages that have a . (See voiced velar stop for another such gap.) This is an areal feature of the circum-Saharan zone (Africa north of the equator plus the Arabian peninsula). It is not known how old this areal feature is, and whether it might be a recent phenomenon due to Arabic as a prestige language (Arabic shifted to but the timing of this change is not known), or whether Arabic was itself affected by a more ancient areal pattern. It is found in other areas as well; for example, in Europe, Proto-Celtic and Old Basque are both reconstructed as having but no . Nonetheless, the sound is very common cross-linguistically. Most la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots, and then closest related to the Low Saxon and Frisian languages, English is genealogically West Germanic. However, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of France (about 29% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
