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In spoken languages, segments will typically be grouped into consonants and vowels, but the term can be applied to any minimal unit of a linear sequence meaningful to the given field of analysis, such as a mora or a syllable in prosodic phonology, a morpheme in morphology, or a chereme in sign language analysis.
A number of sign languages are spoken throughout Asia. These include the Japanese Sign Language family, Chinese Sign Language, Indo-Pakistani Sign Language, as well as a number of small indigenous sign languages of countries such as Nepal, Thailand, and Vietnam. Many official sign languages are part of the French Sign Language family.
Many non-native Chinese speakers have difficulties mastering the tones of each character, but correct tonal pronunciation is essential for intelligibility because of the vast number of words in the language that only differ by tone (i.e. are minimal pairs with respect to tone). Statistically, tones are as important as vowels in Standard Chinese.
Non-pulmonic consonants are sounds whose airflow is not dependent on the lungs. These include clicks (found in the Khoisan languages and some neighboring Bantu languages of Africa), implosives (found in languages such as Sindhi, Hausa, Swahili and Vietnamese), and ejectives (found in many Amerindian and Caucasian languages).
They suggest that the perceptual impression of Japanese /u/ as an unrounded vowel could be caused partly by its fronted articulation, and partly by its protrusion being accompanied by less vertical lip closure compared to /u/ in other languages, resulting in a less rounded sound. Lip protrusion was also found to be greater for Japanese /u/ than ...
The determination of the sound level can be based on the frequencies of occurrence of the sound items, or it can be estimated based on reading experiences: when a person with relatively rich reading experience sees a polyphonic polysemous character, sounds that can be read regardless of the context are frequent readings (such as “間 ...
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic ...
Most Polynesian languages stress the second to last mora of the word, but Māori stress follows many elaborate rules, which still remain not thoroughly understood. [5] One of the rules requires assigning hierarchy to syllables, and if more than one syllable receives the highest rank, the first one gets stressed: [ 5 ]