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In other words, a language develops a new system of oppositions among its phonemes. Old contrasts may disappear, new ones may emerge, or they may simply be rearranged. [1] Sound change may be an impetus for changes in the phonological structures of a language (and likewise, phonological change may sway the process of sound change). [1]
The same process also affects stressed front and back vowels in hiatus if they are antepenultimate (in the third-to-last syllable of a word). When /j/ is produced, primary stress shifts to the following vowel, but when /w/ is produced, primary stress shifts instead to the preceding syllable. Cf.
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist (phonological change), such as the merger of two sounds or the creation of a new sound.
A number of phonological processes affected Old English in the period before the earliest documentation. The processes affected especially vowels and are the reason that many Old English words look significantly different from related words in languages such as Old High German , which is much closer to the common West Germanic ancestor of both ...
In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological processes that interact with one another; those that are active and those that are suppressed is language-specific. 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 ...
Some languages have harmony processes that involve an interaction between vowels and consonants. For example, Chilcotin has a phonological process known as vowel flattening (i.e. post-velar harmony) where vowels must harmonize with uvular and pharyngealized consonants. Chilcotin has two classes of vowels: "flat" vowels [ᵊi, e, ᵊɪ, o, ɔ ...
Flapping, or tapping, is a process whereby /t/ or /d/ is pronounced as the alveolar flap [ɾ] in certain positions, especially between vowels (but also sometimes after other sonorants). It may be perceived as, for example, the pronunciation of butter as "budder".
Phonological development refers to how children learn to organize sounds into meaning or language during their stages of growth. Sound is at the beginning of language learning. Children have to learn to distinguish different sounds and to segment the speech stream they are exposed to into units – eventually meaningful units – in order to ...