|
Approximant Consonants
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-syllabi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phone (phonetics)
In phonetics (a branch of linguistics), a phone is any distinct speech sound. It is any surface-level or unanalyzed sound of a language, the smallest identifiable unit occurring inside a stream of speech. In spoken human language, a phone is thus any vowel or consonant sound (or semivowel sound). In sign language, a phone is the equivalent of a unit of gesture. Phones versus phonemes Phones are the segment (linguistics), segments of speech that possess distinct physical or perceptual properties, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words. Whereas a phone is a Abstract and concrete, concrete sound used across various spoken languages, a phoneme is more abstract and narrowly defined: any class of phones that the users of a particular language nevertheless ''perceive'' as a single basic sound, a single unit, and that distinguishes words from other words. If a phoneme is swapped with another phoneme inside a word, it can change the meaning of that word, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syllable Nucleus
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are most often consonants). In phonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre; properties such as stress, tone and reduplication operate on syllables and their parts. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ''ignite'' is made of two syllables: ''ig'' and ''nite''. Most languages of the world use relatively simple syllable structures that often alternate between vowels and consonants. Despite being present in virtually all human languages, syllables still have no precise definition that is valid for all known languages. A common criterion for finding syllable bounda ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
