Phonology (from Ancient Greek Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning the Archaic , Classical (c. 5th–4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic (c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD) periods of ancient Greece and the ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek. Its Hellenistic phase is known as Koine (&: φωνή, phōnḗ, "voice, sound" and λόγος, lógos, "word, speech, subject of discussion") is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language A human language is a language primarily intended for communication among humans. The two major categories of human languages are natural languages and constructed languages. The term is used in the opposition to other kinds of communication used by humans traditionally called "language", such as formal language or machine language, as, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages and vocabulary A person's vocabulary is the set of words they are familiar with in a language. A vocabulary usually grows and evolves with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system. When describing the formal area of study, the term typically describes linguistic analysis either beneath the word (e.g., syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants), onset and rhyme In the study of phonology in linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda. It is the part of the syllable used in poetic rhyme, and the part that is lengthened or stressed when a person elongates or stresses a word in speech, phoneme In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances, articulatory gestures Articulatory gestures are the actions necessary to enunciate language. Examples of articulatory gestures are the hand movements necessary to enunciate sign language and the mouth movements of speech. In semiotic terms, they are the physical embodiment of speech signs, which are gestural by nature (see below), articulatory feature, mora Mora is a unit of sound used in phonology that determines syllable weight (which in turn determines stress or timing) in some languages. As with many technical linguistics terms, the exact definition of mora varies. Perhaps the most succinct working definition was provided by the American linguist James D. McCawley in 1968: a mora is “Something, etc.) or to units at all levels of language that are thought to structure sound for conveying linguistic meaning The field of semantics is often understood as a branch of linguistics, but non-idealized meaning as a type of semantics is more accurately a branch of psychology and ethics. Meaning in so far is it is objectified by not considering particular situations and the real intentions of speakers and writers examines the ways in which words, phrases, and. It is viewed as the subfield of linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning (semantics and pragmatics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words that deals with the sound Sound is a travelling wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations systems of languages Language is a term most commonly used to refer to so-called "natural languages" — the spoken forms of communication ubiquitous among humankind. By extension the term also refers to the type of thought process which creates and uses language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic creation, maintenance and use of systems of. Whereas phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds (phones): their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status. Phonology, on the other hand, is concerned with abstract, grammatical is about the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception In philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. The word "perception" comes from the Latin words perceptio, percipio, and means "receiving, collecting, action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind or senses." of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. The term "phonology" was used in the linguistics of a greater part of the 20th century as a cover term uniting phonemics and phonetics. Current phonology can interface with disciplines such as psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern research makes use and speech perception Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology. Research in speech perception seeks to understand how human listeners recognize, resulting in specific areas like articulatory or laboratory phonology.
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Overview
An important part of traditional forms of phonology has been studying which sounds can be grouped into distinctive units within a language; these units are known as phonemes In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances. For example, in English, the [p] sound in pot is aspirated In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. 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 tore and then store ([stɔɹ]). One should either feel (pronounced [pʰ]), while the word- and syllable-final [p] in soup is not aspirated (indeed, it might be realized as a glottal stop). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations (allophones In phonetics, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds (or phones) used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, [pʰ] (as in pin) and [p] (as in spin) are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language. Although a phoneme's allophones are all alternative pronunciations for a phoneme, the specific allophones) of the same phonological category, that is, of the phoneme /p/. Traditionally, it would be argued that if a word-initial aspirated [p] were interchanged with the word-final unaspirated [p] in soup, they would still be perceived by native speakers of English as "the same" /p/. (However, speech perception findings now put this theory in doubt.) Although some sort of "sameness" of these two sounds holds in English, it is not universal and may be absent in other languages. For example, in Thai Thai (ภาษาไทย Phasa Thai [pʰāːsǎːtʰāj] ) is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai-Kadai language family. Historical linguists have been unable to definitively link the Tai-Kadai languages to any, Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: हिन्दी or हिंदी, IAST: Hindī, IPA: [ˈɦɪndiː] ) is the name given to various Indo-Aryan languages, dialects, and language registers spoken in northern and central India, Pakistan, Fiji, Mauritius, and Suriname. Standard Hindi is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India, one of the official language, and Quechua Quechua is a Native American language family or macrolanguage spoken primarily in the Andes of South America, derived from an original common ancestor language, Proto-Quechua. It is the most widely spoken language family of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a total of probably some 6 to 8 million speakers . Some speakers of Quechua also, aspiration and non-aspiration differentiates phonemes: that is, there are word pairs that differ only in this feature (there are minimal pairs In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have a distinct meaning. They are used to demonstrate that two phones constitute two separate phonemes in the language differing only in aspiration).
In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the phonemes In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances), phonology studies how sounds alternate, i.e. replace one another in different forms of the same morpheme (allomorphs An allomorph is a linguistics term for a variant form of a morpheme. The concept occurs when a unit of meaning can vary in sound without changing meaning. It is used in linguistics to explain the comprehension of variations in sound for a specific morpheme), as well as, e.g., syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants) structure, stress In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense, accent In linguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation of a language. Accents can be confused with dialects which are varieties of language differing in vocabulary, syntax, and morphology, as well as pronunciation. Dialects are usually spoken by a group united by geography or social status.[citation needed], and intonation In linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. Intonation and stress are two main elements of linguistic prosody.
The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign languages A sign language is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns (manual communication, body language) to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's thoughts, even though the sub-lexical units are not instantiated as speech sounds. The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality In semiotics, a modality is a particular way in which the information is to be encoded for presentation to humans, i.e. to the type of sign and to the status of reality ascribed to or claimed by a sign, text or genre. It is more closely associated with the semiotics of Charles Peirce than Saussure (1857-1913) because meaning is conceived as an because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones. On the other hand, it must be noted, it is difficult to analyze phonologically a language one does not speak, and most phonological analysis takes place with recourse to phonetic information.
Representing phonemes
A diagram of the vocal tract The vocal tract is the cavity in animals where sound that is produced at the sound source is filtered. In birds it consists of the trachea, the syrinx, the oral cavity, the upper part of the esophagus, and the beak. In mammals it consists of the laryngeal cavity, the pharynx, the oral cavity, and the nasal cavity, and in some nonhuman mammals The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic Arabic (العربية al-ʿarabīyah, ( Arabic pronunciation ) or عربي ʿarabī) is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and the Neo-Aramaic languages. Arabic has more speakers than any other language in the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million and (Israeli) Hebrew Extinct as a regularly spoken language by the 4th century CE, but survived as a liturgical and literary language; revived in the 1880s from the phonemic point of view. Note the intersection of the two circles—the distinction between short a, i and u is made by both speakers, but Arabic lacks the mid articulation of short vowels, while Hebrew lacks the distinction of vowel length.The writing systems Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to comprehend the text. In contrast, other possible symbolic systems such as information signs, painting, maps and mathematics often do not require prior knowledge of a spoken of some languages are based on the phonemic principle of having one letter (or combination of letters) per phoneme and vice-versa. Ideally, speakers can correctly write whatever they can say, and can correctly read anything that is written. However in English, different spellings can be used for the same phoneme (e.g., rude and food have the same vowel sounds), and the same letter (or combination of letters) can represent different phonemes (e.g., the "th" consonant sounds of thin and this are different). In order to avoid this confusion based on orthography, phonologists represent phonemes by writing them between two slashes: " / / ". On the other hand, reference to variations of phonemes or attempts at representing actual speech sounds are usually enclosed by square brackets: " [ ] ". While the letters between slashes may be based on spelling conventions, the letters between square brackets are usually the International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet [note 1] is a system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet, devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech pathologists and therapists, singers, (IPA) or some other phonetic transcription system. Additionally, angled brackets " ⟨ ⟩ " can be used to isolate the graphemes of an alphabetic writing system.
Phoneme inventories
Doing a phoneme inventory
The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonetic point of view. Note that the two circles are totally separate—none of the vowel-sounds made by speakers of one language are made by speakers of the other. One modern theory is that Israeli Hebrew's phonology reflects Yiddish Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages. It is written in the Hebrew alphabet elements, not Semitic The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. They constitute a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. The most widely spoken Semitic language by far today is Arabic . It is followed by Amharic (2 ones.Part of the phonological study of a language involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions Transcription in the linguistic sense is the conversion of a representation of language into another representation of language, usually in the same language but in a different form. A transcriptionist is a person who performs transcription of the speech of native speakers A first language is the language a human being learns from birth. The term is also used for the language that the speaker speaks best. In either case, a person's first language is a basis for sociolinguistic identity) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances are and what the sound inventory of the language is. Even though a language may make distinctions between a small number of phonemes, speakers actually produce many more phonetic sounds. Thus, a phoneme in a particular language can be instantiated in many ways.
Traditionally, looking for minimal pairs forms part of the research in studying the phoneme inventory of a language. A minimal pair In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have a distinct meaning. They are used to demonstrate that two phones constitute two separate phonemes in the language is a pair of words from the same language, that differ by only a single categorical sound, and that are recognized by speakers as being two different words. When there is a minimal pair, the two sounds are said to be examples of realizations of distinct phonemes. However, since it is often impossible to detect or agree to the existence of all the possible phonemes of a language with this method, other approaches are used as well.
Phonemic distinctions or allophones
If two similar sounds do not belong to separate phonemes, they are called allophones In phonetics, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds (or phones) used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, [pʰ] (as in pin) and [p] (as in spin) are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language. Although a phoneme's allophones are all alternative pronunciations for a phoneme, the specific allophones of the same underlying phoneme. For instance, voiceless stops (/p/, /t/, /k/) can be aspirated. In English, voiceless stops at the beginning of a stressed syllable (but not after /s/) are aspirated In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. 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 tore and then store ([stɔɹ]). One should either feel, whereas after /s/ they are not aspirated. This can be seen by putting the fingers right in front of the lips and noticing the difference in breathiness in saying pin versus spin. There is no English word pin that starts with an unaspirated p, therefore in English, aspirated [pʰ] (the [ʰ] means aspirated) and unaspirated [p] are allophones of the same phoneme /p/. This is an example of a complementary distribution Complementary distribution in linguistics is the relationship between two different elements, where one element is found in a particular environment and the other element is found in the opposite environment. It often indicates that two superficially different elements are in fact the same linguistic unit at a deeper level. Comparing this concept.
The /t/ sounds in the words tub, stub, but, butter, and button are all pronounced differently in American English, yet are all intuited to be of "the same sound", therefore they constitute another example of allophones of the same phoneme in English. However, an intuition such as this could be interpreted as a function of post-lexical recognition of the sounds. That is, all are seen as examples of English /t/ once the word itself has been recognized.
The findings and insights of speech perception and articulation research complicates this idea of interchangeable allophones being perceived as the same phoneme, no matter how attractive it might be for linguists who wish to rely on the intuitions of native speakers. First, interchanged allophones of the same phoneme can result in unrecognizable words. Second, actual speech, even at a word level, is highly co-articulated, so it is problematic to think that one can splice words into simple segments without affecting speech perception. In other words, interchanging allophones is a nice idea for intuitive linguistics, but it turns out that this idea can not transcend what co-articulation actually does to spoken sounds. Yet human speech perception is so robust and versatile (happening under various conditions) because, in part, it can deal with such co-articulation.
There are different methods for determining why allophones should fall categorically under a specified phoneme. Counter-intuitively, the principle of phonetic similarity is not always used. This tends to make the phoneme seem abstracted away from the phonetic realities of speech. It should be remembered that, just because allophones can be grouped under phonemes for the purpose of linguistic analysis, this does not necessarily mean that this is an actual process in the way the human brain processes a language. On the other hand, it could be pointed out that some sort of analytic notion of a language beneath the word level is usual if the language is written alphabetically. So one could also speak of a phonology of reading and writing.
Change of a phoneme inventory over time
The particular sounds which are phonemic in a language can change over time. At one time, [f] and [v] were allophones in English, but these later changed into separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described in historical linguistics Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents dating back to antiquity.
Other topics in phonology
Phonology also includes topics such as phonotactics Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters, and vowel sequences by means of phonotactical constraints (the phonological constraints on what sounds can appear in what positions in a given language) and phonological alternation In linguistics, an alternation is the phenomenon of a phoneme or morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization. Each of the various realizations is called an alternant. The variation may be conditioned by the phonological, morphological, and/or syntactic environment in which the morpheme finds itself (how the pronunciation of a sound changes through the application of phonological rules A phonological rule is a formal way of expressing a systematic phonological or morphophonological process or diachronic sound change in language. Phonological rules are commonly used in generative phonology as a notation to capture sound-related operations and computations the human brain performs when producing or comprehending spoken language, sometimes in a given order which can be feeding or bleeding,[1] as well as prosody, the study of suprasegmentals and topics such as stress and intonation.
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