Modern phonologists often divide Indian English into five major varieties.
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The term does, however, continue to be used by some phonologists to denote laryngeal consonants (including uvulars), as well as murmured, pharyngealized, glottalized, and strident vowels.
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640px Hierarchical model for cat and sing upright=2.5 In some theories of phonology, syllable structures are displayed as tree diagrams (similar to the trees found in some types of syntax). Not all phonologists agree that syllables have internal structure; in fact, some phonologists doubt the existence of the syllable as a theoretical entity.See CUNY Conference on the Syllable for discussion of the theoretical existence of the syllable. There are many arguments for a hierarchical relationship, rather than a linear one, between the syllable constituents.
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Some contrastive elements of speech cannot be easily analyzed as distinct segments but rather belong to a syllable or word. These elements are called suprasegmental, and include intonation and stress. In some languages nasality and vowel harmony are considered suprasegmental or prosodic by some phonologists.
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Chaha or Cheha (in Chaha and Amharic: ቸሃ čehā or čexā) is a Gurage language spoken in central Ethiopia, mainly within the Gurage Zone in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region. It is also spoken by Gurage settlers in Ethiopian cities, especially Addis Ababa. Chaha is known to many phonologists and morphologists for its very complex morphophonology.
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There is an extensive amount of data on the Miami-Illinois language. The problem with much of the data collected is that little of it was collected by trained phonologists and thus much of it is incomplete or incorrect. David Costa has written extensively on this language, compiling much of this data and correcting it in his book The Miami-Illinois Language.
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In addition, a phoneme may be unmarked with respect to a feature. It is also possible for certain phonemes to have different features across languages. For example, could be classified as a continuant or not in a given language depending on how it patterns with other consonants. In recent developments to the theory of distinctive features, phonologists have proposed the existence of single-valued features.
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Phonologists have sometimes had recourse to "near minimal pairs" to show that speakers of the language perceive two sounds as significantly different even if no exact minimal pair exists in the lexicon. It is virtually impossible to find a minimal pair to distinguish English from , yet it seems uncontroversial to claim that the two consonants are distinct phonemes. The two words 'pressure' and 'pleasure' can serve as a near minimal pair.
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In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some languages have glottalized sonorants with creaky voice that pattern with ejectives phonologically, and other languages have ejectives that pattern with implosives, which has led to phonologists positing a phonological class of glottalic consonants, which includes ejectives.
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However, Hiberno-English's diverse accents and some of its grammatical structures are unique, with some influence by the Irish language and some instances of phonologically conservative features: features no longer common in the accents of England or North America. Phonologists today often divide Hiberno-English into four or five overarching classes of dialects or accents:Hickey, Raymond. A Sound Atlas of Irish English, Volume 1. Walter de Gruyter: 2004, pp. 57-60.
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Steriade's research focuses on phonology and morphophonology and she is now one of the world's leading phonologists, especially as pertaining to her leading work on underspecification and neutralization. She began her academic career studying classics in Bucharest, but left after her father emigrated to Canada. She later matriculated to MIT to study under Morris Halle to investigate the universal elements of language. Her dissertation was entitled, "Greek prosodies and the nature of syllabification".
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When forming a sibilant, one still is forcing air through a narrow channel, but in addition, the tongue is curled lengthwise to direct the air over the edge of the teeth. English , , , and are examples of sibilants. The usage of two other terms is less standardized: "Spirant" is an older term for fricatives used by some American and European phoneticians and phonologists. "Strident" could mean just "sibilant", but some authors include also labiodental and uvular fricatives in the class.
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The handwritten Czech alphabet Czech has one of the most phonemic orthographies of all European languages. Its thirty-one graphemes represent thirty sounds (in most dialects, i and y have the same sound), and it contains only one digraph: ch, which follows h in the alphabet. As a result, some of its characters have been used by phonologists to denote corresponding sounds in other languages. The characters q, w and x appear only in foreign words.
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The human speech apparatus in sagittal sectionIn the 1950s, phonology was generally considered the most rigorously scientific branch of linguistics. For phonologists, "digital infinity" was made possible by the human vocal apparatus conceptualised as a kind of machine consisting of a small number of binary switches. For example, "voicing" could be switched 'on' or 'off', as could palatisation, nasalisation and so forth. Take the consonant [b], for example, and switch voicing to the 'off' position—and you get [p].
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The term was introduced by Paul Kiparsky (1968), and contrasts with contextual neutralization where some phonemes are not contrastive in certain environments.Kiparsky, P., Linguistic universals and linguistic change. In: E. Bach & R.T. Harms (eds.), Universals in linguistic theory, 1968, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston (pp. 170–202) Some phonologists prefer not to specify a unique phoneme in such cases, since to do so would mean providing redundant or even arbitrary information – instead they use the technique of underspecification.
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When the national language was standardized, the Ministry of Education (ROC) designated 'kè' as the 'Guoyu' reading, as did the Ministry of Education (PRC) more recently for the 'Putonghua' standard. Though most dictionaries indicate only this reading, the Cihai (as recently as the 1999 edition), has given 'què' as an alternative 'old' reading for 恪. This is almost certainly an oblique acknowledgment of Chen's reading of this character. Phonologists have speculated that 'què' is a Mandarin approximation of the pronunciation of 恪 in Chen's childhood Hakka dialect.
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Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups. Prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance. Phonological processes are unordered with respect to each other and apply simultaneously (though the output of one process may be the input to another). The second most prominent natural phonologist is Patricia Donegan (Stampe's wife); there are many natural phonologists in Europe, and a few in the U.S., such as Geoffrey Nathan.
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One blurry area is in segments variously called semivowels, semiconsonants, or glides. On one side, there are vowel-like segments that are not in themselves syllabic, but form diphthongs as part of the syllable nucleus, as the i in English boil . On the other, there are approximants that behave like consonants in forming onsets, but are articulated very much like vowels, as the y in English yes . Some phonologists model these as both being the underlying vowel , so that the English word bit would phonemically be , beet would be , and yield would be phonemically .
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Metrical phonology is a theory of stress or linguistic prominence. The innovative feature of this theory is that the prominence of a unit is defined relative to other units in the same phrase. For example, in the most common pronunciation of the phrase "doctors use penicillin" (if said out-of-the- blue), the syllable '-ci-' is the strongest or most stressed syllable in the phrase, but the syllable 'doc-' is more stressed than the syllable '-tors'. Previously, generative phonologists and the American Structuralists represented prosodic prominence as a feature that applied to individual phonemes (segments) or syllables.
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Guttural speech sounds are those with a primary place of articulation near the back of the oral cavity. In some definitions, this is restricted to pharyngeal consonants, but in others includes some velar and uvular consonants. Guttural sounds are typically consonants, but some vowels' articulations may also be considered guttural in nature. Although the term has historically been used by phoneticians, and is occasionally used by phonologists today, its technical use is now limited, and it is more common in popular use as an imprecise term for sounds produced relatively far back in the vocal tract.
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Hangzhou dialect (, Rhangzei Rhwa) is spoken in the city of Hangzhou and its immediate suburbs, but excluding areas further away from Hangzhou such as Xiāoshān (蕭山) and Yúháng (余杭) (both originally county-level cities and now the districts within Hangzhou City). The number of speakers of the Hangzhou dialect has been estimated to be about 1.2 to 1.5 million. It is a dialect of Wu, one of the Chinese varieties. The Hangzhou dialect is of immense interest to Chinese historical phonologists and dialectologists because phonologically, it exhibits extensive similarities with the other Wu dialects; however, grammatically and lexically, it shows many Mandarin tendencies.
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The grave/acute distinction has lost its relevance in modern phonetics, but it may still be relevant to other disciplines. The distinction dates from relatively early in the days of acoustic phonetics, at a time that some phonologists believed that one could categorize all speech sounds by a finite set of acoustically-defined distinctive features, which were supposed to correspond to auditory impressions of sounds. The pioneering publication was Jakobson, Fant and Halle (1951) Preliminaries to Speech Analysis (MIT). Grave/acute was defined primarily in acoustic terms (with some reference to auditory qualities), but sounds were given a secondary description (or gloss) in terms of their articulation.
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Until the 1950s, many phonologists assumed that neutralizing rules generally applied before allophonic rules. Thus phonological analysis was split into two parts: a morphophonological part, where neutralizing rules were developed to derive phonemes from morphophonemes; and a purely phonological part, where phones were derived from the phonemes. Since the 1960s (in particular with the work of the generative school, such as Chomsky and Halle's The Sound Pattern of English) many linguists have moved away from making such a split, instead regarding the surface phones as being derived from the underlying morphophonemes (which may be referred to using various terminology) through a single system of (morpho)phonological rules. The purpose of both phonemic and morphophonemic analysis is to produce simpler underlying descriptions for what appear on the surface to be complicated patterns.
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There can be disagreement about the location of some divisions between syllables in spoken language. The problems of dealing with such cases have been most commonly discussed with relation to English. In the case of a word such as "hurry", the division may be or , neither of which seems a satisfactory analysis for a non- rhotic accent such as RP (British English): results in a syllable-final , which is not normally found, while gives a syllable-final short stressed vowel, which is also non-occurring. Arguments can be made in favour of one solution or the other: Wells (2002) proposes a general rule that "Subject to certain conditions ..., consonants are syllabified with the more strongly stressed of two flanking syllables", while many other phonologists prefer to divide syllables with the consonant or consonants attached to the following syllable wherever possible.
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Meertens (right) & C.J.E. Dinaux After his studies, Meertens taught school for a few years. On 1 July 1930 he became secretary of the committee of dialects for the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW); starting with only two assistants he built a system of documentation that employed two thousands correspondents throughout the country who reported on local dialects. In 1934 the KNAW started a committee for ethnology, and Meertens presided over that committee as well, laying the foundation for the institute which was to receive his name in 1979. He was actively involved with the Phonologische Werkgemeenschap, an organization of phonologists, and when the Centrale Commissie voor Onderzoek naar het Nederlandse Volkseigen was founded in 1948, a state-supported institution that oversaw the entire field of Dutch linguistics and onomastics, Meertens was appointed president of the bureaus for dialectology, onomastics, and ethnography, a function he held until his retirement in 1965.
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During the development of phoneme theory in the mid-20th century phonologists were concerned not only with the procedures and principles involved in producing a phonemic analysis of the sounds of a given language, but also with the reality or uniqueness of the phonemic solution. Some writers took the position expressed by Kenneth Pike: "There is only one accurate phonemic analysis for a given set of data",Pike, K.L. (1947) Phonemics, University of Michigan Press, p. 64 while others believed that different analyses, equally valid, could be made for the same data. Yuen Ren Chao (1934), in his article "The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems" stated "given the sounds of a language, there are usually more than one possible way of reducing them to a set of phonemes, and these different systems or solutions are not simply correct or incorrect, but may be regarded only as being good or bad for various purposes".
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