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English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation , both historically and from dialect to dialect . In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system.
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phonemes 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 .
As an example, the vowel spelled a corresponds to two Middle English pronunciations: /a/ in most circumstances, but long /aː/ in an open syllable, i.e. followed by a single consonant and then a vowel, notated aCV in the spelling column. (This discussion ignores the effect of trisyllabic laxing.)
The Sound Pattern of English (frequently referred to as SPE) is a 1968 work on phonology by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. In spite of its title, it presents not only a view of the phonology of English, but also discussions of a large variety of phonological phenomena of many other languages. The index lists about 100 such languages.
Another English example is ‘would you’ -> /wʊd ju/ -> [wʊdʒu]. There are examples in other languages, such as Chumburung where /ɪ̀wú ɪ̀sá/ -> /ɪ̀wúɪ̀sá/ becomes [ɪ̀wɪ́sá] - ‘three horns’. In this case, /ɪ/ is retained in the coalescence and the rising tone on /u/ appears on the coalesced sound. [9]
In phonology, particularly within historical linguistics, dissimilation is a phenomenon whereby similar consonants or vowels in a word become less similar or elided. In English, dissimilation is particularly common with liquid consonants such as /r/ and /l/ when they occur in a sequence.
The process has shaped many English words historically. Bird and horse came from Old English bridd and hros; [citation needed] wasp and hasp were also written wæps and hæps. The Old English beorht "bright" underwent metathesis to bryht, which became Modern English bright. The Old English þrēo "three" formed þridda "thrid" and þrēotene ...
The rhythm of the English language has four different elements: stress, time, pause, and pitch. Furthermore, "When stress is the basis of the metric pattern, we have poetry; when pitch is the pattern basis, we have rhythmic prose" (Weeks 11). Stress retraction is a popular example of phrasal prosody in everyday life. For example: