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Consonants By Airstream
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced throughout the vocal tract; , , and pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and and , which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Most consonants are pulmonic, using air pressure from the lungs to generate a sound. Very few natural languages are non-pulmonic, making use of ejectives, implosives, and clicks. Contrasting with consonants are vowels. Since the number of speech sounds in the world's languages is much greater than the number of letters in any one alphabet, linguists have devised systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique and unambiguo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Articulatory Phonetics
The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics that studies articulation and ways that humans produce speech. Articulatory phoneticians explain how humans produce speech sounds via the interaction of different physiological structures. Generally, articulatory phonetics is concerned with the transformation of aerodynamic energy into acoustic energy. Aerodynamic energy refers to the airflow through the vocal tract. Its potential form is air pressure; its kinetic form is the actual dynamic airflow. Acoustic energy is variation in the air pressure that can be represented as sound waves, which are then perceived by the human auditory system as sound. Respiratory sounds can be produced by expelling air from the lungs. However, to vary the sound quality in a way useful for speaking, two speech organs normally move towards each other to contact each other to create an obstruction that shapes the air in a particular fashion. The point of maximum obstruction is called ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph () or digram is a pair of character (symbol), characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined. Some digraphs represent phonemes that cannot be represented with a single character in the writing system of a language, like in Spanish ''chico'' and ''ocho''. Other digraphs represent phonemes that can also be represented by single characters. A digraph that shares its pronunciation with a single character may be a relic from an earlier period of the language when the digraph had a different pronunciation, or may represent a distinction that is made only in certain dialects, like the English . Some such digraphs are used for purely etymology, etymological reasons, like in French. In some orthographies, digraphs (and occasionally trigraph (orthography), trigraphs) are considered individual letter (alphabet), letters, w ... [...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] |
Rhoticity In English
The distinction between rhoticity and non-rhoticity is one of the most prominent ways in which varieties of the English language are classified. In rhotic accents, the sound of the historical English rhotic consonant, , is preserved in all phonetic environments. In non-rhotic accents, speakers no longer pronounce in postvocalic environments: when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words ''hard'' and ''butter'' as and , but a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the sound and pronounces them as and . When an ''r'' is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "bette''r a''pples," most non-rhotic speakers will preserve the in that position (the linking R), because it is followed by a vowel. The rhotic dialects of English include most of those in Scotland, Ireland, the United States, and Canada. The non-rhotic dialects include most of those in Englan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Orthography
English orthography comprises the set of rules used when writing the English language, allowing readers and writers to associate written graphemes with the sounds of spoken English, as well as other features of the language. English's orthography includes norms for spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word, word breaks, Emphasis (typography), emphasis, and punctuation. As with the orthographies of most other world languages, written English is broadly standardised. This standardisation began to develop when movable type spread to England in the late 15th century. However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell every phoneme, and most grapheme, letters also represent multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context. This is partly due to the large number of words that have been Loanword, loaned from a large number of other languages throughout the history of English, without successful attempts at complete English-language spe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Letter (alphabet)
In a writing system, a letter is a grapheme that generally corresponds to a phoneme—the smallest functional unit of speech—though there is rarely total one-to-one correspondence between the two. An alphabet is a writing system that uses letters. Definition and usage A letter is a type of grapheme, the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes, the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called a ''multigraph (orthography), multigraph''. Multigraphs include ''digraphs'' of two letters (e.g. English ''ch'', ''sh'', ''th''), and ''trigraphs'' of three letters (e.g. English ''tch''). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H, Greek eta , an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nuxalk Language
Nuxalk (, ), also known as Bella Coola , is a Salishan language spoken by the Nuxalk people. Today, it is an endangered language in the vicinity of the Canadian town of Bella Coola, British Columbia. While the language is still sometimes called ''Bella Coola'' by linguists, the native name ''Nuxalk'' is preferred by some, notably by the Nuxalk Nation's government. Though the number of truly fluent speakers has not increased, the language is now taught in both the provincial school system and the Nuxalk Nation's own school, , which means "a place of learning". Nuxalk language classes, if taken to at least the Grade 11 level, are considered adequate second-language qualifications for entry to the major B.C. universities. CKNN-FM Nuxalk Radio is also working to promote the language. Name The name "Nuxalk" for the language comes from the native (or ), referring to the " Bella Coola Valley". "Bella Coola" is a rendering of the Heiltsuk , meaning "stranger". Geographical dist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Salishan Languages
The Salishan languages ( ), also known as the Salish languages ( ), are a Language family, family of languages found in the Pacific Northwest in North America, namely the Canadian province of British Columbia and the American states of Washington (state), Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. They are characterised by agglutinative, agglutinativity and syllabic consonants. For instance the Nuxalk language, Nuxalk word (), meaning 'he had had [in his possession] a Cornus canadensis, bunchberry plant', has twelve obstruent consonants in a row with no phonetic or phonemic vowels. The Salishan languages are a geographically contiguous block, with the exception of the Nuxalk (Bella Coola), in the British Columbia Coast, Central Coast of British Columbia, and the extinct Tillamook language, to the south on the central coast of Oregon. The terms ''Salish'' and ''Salishan'' are used interchangeably by linguists and anthropologists. The name ''Salish'' or ''Selisch'' is the endonym o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plosive Consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips (, ), or glottis (). Plosives contrast with nasals, where the vocal tract is blocked but airflow continues through the nose, as in and , and with fricatives, where partial occlusion impedes but does not block airflow in the vocal tract. Terminology The terms ''stop, occlusive,'' and ''plosive'' are often used interchangeably. Linguists who distinguish them may not agree on the distinction being made. "Stop" refers to the stopping of the airflow, "occlusive" to the articulation which occludes (blocks) the vocal tract, and "plosive" to the plosion (release burst) of the consonant. Some object to the use of "plosive" for inaudibly released stops, which may then instead be called "applosives". The International Phonetic Association and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Continuant
In phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ..., a continuant is a speech sound produced without a complete closure in the oral cavity. By one definition, ''continuant'' is a distinctive feature that refers to any sound produced with an incomplete closure of the vocal tract, thus encompassing all sounds (including vowels) except nasals, plosives and affricates. By another definition, it refers exclusively to consonantal sounds produced with an incomplete closure of the oral cavity, prototypically approximants and fricatives, but sometimes also trills. Compare sonorants (resonants), a class of speech sounds which includes vowels, approximants and nasals (but not fricatives), and contrasts with obstruents. See also * List of phonetics topics * Spectr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dionysius Thrax
Dionysius Thrax ( ''Dionýsios ho Thrâix'', 170–90 BC) was a Greek grammarian and a pupil of Aristarchus of Samothrace. He was long considered to be the author of the earliest grammatical text on the Greek language, one that was used as a standard manual for perhaps some 1,500 years, and which was until recently regarded as the groundwork of the entire Western grammatical tradition. Life His place of origin was not Thrace, as the epithet "Thrax" denotes, but probably Alexandria. His Thracian background was inferred from the name of his father Tērēs (Τήρης), which is considered to be a Thracian name. One of his co-students during his studies in Alexandria under Aristarchus was Apollodorus of Athens, who also became a distinguished grammarian. Rudolf Pfeiffer dates his shift to the isle of Rhodes to , when political upheavals associated with the policies of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II are thought to have led to his exile. According to a report in Athenaeus' Deipnosophi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
