1.
Wiktionary
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Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of all words in all languages. It is collaboratively edited via a wiki, and its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and it is available in 172 languages and in Simple English. Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation and its wiki software, MediaWiki, allows almost anyone with access to the website to create and edit entries. The English Wiktionary includes a Wikisaurus of synonyms of various words, Wiktionary data are frequently used in various natural language processing tasks. Wiktionary was brought online on December 12,2002, following a proposal by Daniel Alston, on March 28,2004, the first non-English Wiktionaries were initiated in French and Polish. Wiktionaries in numerous other languages have since been started, Wiktionary was hosted on a temporary domain name until May 1,2004, when it switched to the current domain name. As of November 2016, Wiktionary features over 25.9 million entries across its editions, forty-one Wiktionary language editions now contain over 100,000 entries each. Seven of the 18 bots registered at the English Wiktionary created 163,000 of the entries there, of the 648,970 definitions the English Wiktionary provides for 501,171 English words,217,850 are form of definitions of this kind. This means its coverage of English is slightly smaller than that of major monolingual print dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, has 615,000 headwords, while Merriam-Websters Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged has 475,000 entries. Detailed statistics exist to show how many entries of various kinds exist, the English Wiktionary does not rely on bots to the extent that some other editions do. The French and Vietnamese Wiktionaries, for example, imported large sections of the Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project and these imported entries make up virtually all of the Vietnamese editions contents. Almost all non-Malagasy-language entries of the Malagasy Wiktionary were copied by bot from other Wiktionaries, like the English edition, the French Wiktionary has imported the approximately 20,000 entries from the Unihan database of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. The Russian edition grew by nearly 80,000 entries as LXbot added boilerplate entries for words in English, in 2017 English part of en. wikitionary had over 500,000 gloss definitions and over 900,000 definitions. Wiktionary has historically lacked a uniform logo across its numerous language editions, some editions use logos that depict a dictionary entry about the term Wiktionary, based on the previous English Wiktionary logo, which was designed by Brion Vibber, a MediaWiki developer. Because a purely textual logo must vary considerably from language to language, some communities adopted the winning entry by Smurrayinchester, a 3×3 grid of wooden tiles, each bearing a character from a different writing system. However, the poll did not see as much participation from the Wiktionary community as some community members had hoped, in April 2009, the issue was resurrected with a new contest. This time, a depiction by AAEngelman of an open hardbound dictionary won a vote against the 2006 logo. In the following years, some wikis replaced their logos with one of the two newer logos
2.
Linguistics
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Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning, phonetics is the study of speech and non-speech sounds, and delves into their acoustic and articulatory properties. While the study of semantics typically concerns itself with truth conditions, Grammar is a system of rules which governs the production and use of utterances in a given language. These rules apply to sound as well as meaning, and include componential sub-sets of rules, such as those pertaining to phonology, morphology, modern theories that deal with the principles of grammar are largely based within Noam Chomskys ideological school of generative grammar. In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between the notions of langue and parole in his formulation of structural linguistics. According to him, parole is the utterance of speech, whereas langue refers to an abstract phenomenon that theoretically defines the principles. This distinction resembles the one made by Noam Chomsky between competence and performance in his theory of transformative or generative grammar. According to Chomsky, competence is an innate capacity and potential for language, while performance is the specific way in which it is used by individuals, groups. The study of parole is the domain of sociolinguistics, the sub-discipline that comprises the study of a system of linguistic facets within a certain speech community. Discourse analysis further examines the structure of texts and conversations emerging out of a speech communitys usage of language, Stylistics also involves the study of written, signed, or spoken discourse through varying speech communities, genres, and editorial or narrative formats in the mass media. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida, for instance, further distinguished between speech and writing, by proposing that language be studied as a linguistic medium of communication in itself. Palaeography is therefore the discipline that studies the evolution of scripts in language. Linguistics also deals with the social, cultural, historical and political factors that influence language, through which linguistic, research on language through the sub-branches of historical and evolutionary linguistics also focus on how languages change and grow, particularly over an extended period of time. Language documentation combines anthropological inquiry with linguistic inquiry, in order to describe languages, lexicography involves the documentation of words that form a vocabulary. Such a documentation of a vocabulary from a particular language is usually compiled in a dictionary. Computational linguistics is concerned with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective, specific knowledge of language is applied by speakers during the act of translation and interpretation, as well as in language education – the teaching of a second or foreign language. Policy makers work with governments to implement new plans in education, related areas of study also includes the disciplines of semiotics, literary criticism, translation, and speech-language pathology. Before the 20th century, the philology, first attested in 1716, was commonly used to refer to the science of language
3.
Phoneme
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A phoneme is one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language. The difference in meaning between the English words kill and kiss is a result of the exchange of the phoneme /l/ for the phoneme /s/, two words that differ in meaning through a contrast of a single phoneme form a minimal pair. In linguistics, phonemes are written between slashes like this, /p/, whereas when it is desired to show the exact pronunciation of any sound, linguists use square brackets. Within linguistics there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are, however, a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set of speech sounds which are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. For example, in English, the k sounds in the kit and skill are not identical. Different speech sounds that are realizations of the same phoneme are known as allophones, phonemes are conventionally placed between slashes in transcription, whereas speech sounds are placed between square brackets. Thus /pʊʃ/ represents a sequence of three phonemes /p/, /ʊ/, /ʃ/, while represents the sequence of sounds. The symbols used for particular phonemes are often taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet, however, descriptions of particular languages may use different conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in such as cat, kit, scat. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects the c/k sounds in words are not identical, in kit the sound is aspirated. The words therefore contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed for the aspirated form, the above shows that in English, and are allophones of a single phoneme /k/. For example, in Icelandic, is the first sound of kátur meaning cheerful, Icelandic therefore has two separate phonemes /kʰ/ and /k/. A pair of words like kátur and gátur that differ only in one phone is called a pair for the two alternative phones in question. The existence of pairs is a common test to decide whether two phones represent different phonemes or are allophones of the same phoneme. In other languages, though, including Korean, even though both sounds and occur, no minimal pair exists. The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing and in Korean provides evidence that in this language they are allophones of a single phoneme /t/, the word /tata/ is pronounced, for example. Signed languages, such as American Sign Language also have minimal pairs, Sign language minimal pairs refer to one of the signs parameters, handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and non-manual signal/marker
4.
Hindi
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Hindi, or Modern Standard Hindi is a standardised and Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language. Along with the English language, Hindi written in the Devanagari script, is the language of the Government of India. It is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of the Republic of India, Hindi is the lingua franca of the so-called Hindi belt of India. Outside India, it is a language which is known as Fiji Hindi in Fiji, and is a recognised regional language in Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana. Hindi is the fourth most-spoken first language in the world, after Mandarin, apart from specialized vocabulary, Hindi is mutually intelligible with Standard Urdu, another recognized register of Hindustani. Part XVII of the Indian Constitution deals with Official Language, under Article 343, official language of the Union has been prescribed, which includes Hindi in Devanagari script and English. Gujarat High Court, in 2010, has observed that there was nothing on record to suggest that any provision has been made or order issued declaring Hindi as a language of India. Article 343 of the Indian constitution states The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script, the form of numerals to be used for the official purposes of the Union shall be the international form of Indian numerals. It was envisioned that Hindi would become the working language of the Union Government by 1965. Each may also designate a co-official language, in Uttar Pradesh, for instance, depending on the formation in power. Similarly, Hindi is accorded the status of language in the following Union Territories, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Daman & Diu. National-language status for Hindi is a long-debated theme, an Indian court clarified that Hindi is not the national language of India because the constitution does not mention it as such. Outside Asia, Hindi is a language in Fiji as per the 1997 Constitution of Fiji. It is spoken by 380,000 people in Fiji, Hindi is also spoken by a large population of Madheshis of Nepal. Hindi is quite easy to understand for some Pakistanis, who speak Urdu, apart from this, Hindi is spoken by the large Indian diaspora which hails from, or has its origin from the Hindi Belt of India. Like other Indo-Aryan languages, Hindi is considered to be a descendant of an early form of Sanskrit, through Sauraseni Prakrit. It has been influenced by Dravidian languages, Turkic languages, Persian, Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi emerged as Apabhramsha, a degenerated form of Prakrit, in the 7th century A. D. By the 10th century A. D. it became stable, Braj Bhasha, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Khari Boli etc. are the dialects of Hindi
5.
Urdu
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Urdu is a persianized standard register of the Hindustani language. It is the language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also one of the 22 official languages recognized in the Constitution of India, hyderabad, Rampur, Bhopal and Lucknow are noted Urdu-speaking cities of India. Urdu is historically associated with the Muslims of the northern Indian subcontinent, apart from specialized vocabulary, Urdu is mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi, another recognized register of Hindustani. Urdu, like Hindi, is a form of Hindustani, Urdu developed under the influence of the Persian and Arabic languages, both of which have contributed a significant amount of vocabulary to formal speech. Around 99% of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit, Urdu words originating from Chagatai and Arabic were borrowed through Persian and hence are Persianized versions of the original words. For instance, the Arabic ta marbuta changes to he or te, nevertheless, contrary to popular belief, Urdu did not borrow from the Turkish language, but from Chagatai. Urdu and Turkish borrowed from Arabic and Persian, hence the similarity in pronunciation of many Urdu, Arabic influence in the region began with the late first-millennium Arab invasion of India in the 7th century. The Persian language was introduced into the subcontinent a few centuries later by various Persianized Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties including that of the Delhi Sultanate. With the advent of the British Raj, Persian was no longer the language of administration but Hindustani, still written in the Persian script, the name Urdu was first used by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780. From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century Urdu was commonly known as Hindi, the language was also known by various other names such as Hindavi and Dehlavi. The communal nature of the language lasted until it replaced Persian as the language in 1837 and was made co-official. Urdu was promoted in British India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian and this triggered a Brahman backlash in northwestern India, which argued that the language should be written in the native Devanagari script. At independence, Pakistan established a highly Persianized literary form of Urdu as its national language, English has exerted a heavy influence on both as a co-official language. Owing to interaction with other languages, Urdu has become localized wherever it is spoken, similarly, the Urdu spoken in India can also be distinguished into many dialects like Dakhni of South India, and Khariboli of the Punjab region since recent times. Because of Urdus similarity to Hindi, speakers of the two languages can understand one another if both sides refrain from using specialized vocabulary. The syntax, morphology, and the vocabulary are essentially identical. Thus linguists usually count them as one language and contend that they are considered as two different languages for socio-political reasons
6.
Segment (linguistics)
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In linguistics, a segment is any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech. Segments are called discrete because they are separate and individual, such as consonants and vowels, other contrastive elements of speech, such as prosody, and sometimes secondary articulations such as nasalization, may coexist with multiple segments and cannot be discretely ordered with them. In phonetics, the smallest perceptible segment is a phone, in phonology, there is a subfield of segmental phonology that deals with the analysis of speech into phonemes, which correspond fairly well to phonetic segments of the analysed speech. The segmental phonemes of sign language are visual movements of hands, face and they occur in a distinct spatial and temporal order. The SignWriting script represents the order of the segments with a spatial cluster of graphemes. Other notations for sign language use an order that implies a spatial order. Marginal segments, especially in words, are often the source of new segments in the general inventory of a language. This appears to have been the case with English /ʒ/, which only occurred in French loans. Some contrastive elements of speech cannot be analyzed as distinct segments. 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. Crystal, David, A Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics, Blackwell, gussenhoven, Carlos, Jacobs, Haike, Understanding Phonology, Hodder & Arnold. Bussmann, Hadumod, Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, Routledge, ISBN 978-1-134-63038-7 Emic unit
7.
Vowel
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In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, with two competing definitions. There is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis and this contrasts with consonants, such as the English sh, which have a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. In the other, phonological definition, a vowel is defined as syllabic, a phonetically equivalent but non-syllabic sound is a semivowel. In oral languages, phonetic vowels normally form the peak of many to all syllables, whereas consonants form the onset and coda. Some languages allow other sounds to form the nucleus of a syllable, the word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning vocal. In English, the vowel is commonly used to mean both vowel sounds and the written symbols that represent them. The phonetic definition of vowel does not always match the phonological definition, the approximants and illustrate this, both are produced without much of a constriction in the vocal tract, but they occur at the onset of syllables. A similar debate arises over whether a word like bird in a dialect has an r-colored vowel /ɝ/ or a syllabic consonant /ɹ̩/. The American linguist Kenneth Pike suggested the terms vocoid for a vowel and vowel for a phonological vowel, so using this terminology. Nonetheless, the phonetic and phonemic definitions would still conflict for the syllabic el in table, or the syllabic nasals in button, daniel Jones developed the cardinal vowel system to describe vowels in terms of the features of tongue height, tongue backness and roundedness. These three parameters are indicated in the schematic quadrilateral IPA vowel diagram on the right, there are additional features of vowel quality, such as the velum position, type of vocal fold vibration, and tongue root position. This conception of vowel articulation has been known to be inaccurate since 1928, Peter Ladefoged has said that early phoneticians. Thought they were describing the highest point of the tongue, and they were actually describing formant frequencies. The IPA Handbook concedes that the quadrilateral must be regarded as an abstraction. Vowel height is named for the position of the tongue relative to either the roof of the mouth or the aperture of the jaw. However, it refers to the first formant, abbreviated F1. Height is defined by the inverse of the F1 value, The higher the frequency of the first formant, however, if more precision is required, true-mid vowels may be written with a lowering diacritic. Although English contrasts six heights in its vowels, they are interdependent with differences in backness and it appears that some varieties of German have five contrasting vowel heights independently of length or other parameters
8.
Consonant
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In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. For example, the sound spelled th in this is a different consonant than the th sound in thin, the word consonant comes from Latin oblique stem cōnsonant-, from cōnsonāns sounding-together, a calque of Greek σύμφωνον sýmphōnon. Dionysius Thrax calls consonants sýmphōna pronounced with because they can only be pronounced with a vowel, the word consonant is also used to refer to a letter of an alphabet that denotes a consonant sound. The 21 consonant letters in the English alphabet are B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Z, and usually W and Y. The letter Y stands for the consonant /j/ in yoke, the vowel /ɪ/ in myth, the vowel /i/ in funny, and the diphthong /aɪ/ in my. W always represents a consonant except in combination with a letter, as in growth, raw, and how. In some other languages, such as Finnish, y represents a vowel sound. Such syllables may be abbreviated CV, V, and CVC and this can be argued to be the only pattern found in most of the worlds languages, and perhaps the primary pattern in all of them. However, the distinction between consonant and vowel is not always clear cut, there are consonants and non-syllabic vowels in many of the worlds languages. One blurry area is in segments variously called semivowels, semiconsonants, 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, some phonologists model these as both being the underlying vowel /i/, so that the English word bit would phonemically be /bit/, beet would be /bii̯t/, and yield would be phonemically /i̯ii̯ld/. Likewise, foot would be /fut/, food would be /fuu̯d/, wood would be /u̯ud/, the other problematic area is that of syllabic consonants, segments articulated as consonants but occupying the nucleus of a syllable. Other languages use fricative and often trilled segments as syllabic nuclei, as in Czech and several languages in Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Mandarin, they are historically allophones of /i/, and spelled that way in Pinyin. Ladefoged and Maddieson call these fricative vowels and say that they can usually be thought of as syllabic fricatives that are allophones of vowels and that is, phonetically they are consonants, but phonemically they behave as vowels. Many Slavic languages allow the trill and the lateral as syllabic nuclei, in languages like Nuxalk, it is difficult to know what the nucleus of a syllable is, or if all syllables even have nuclei. If the concept of syllable applies in Nuxalk, there are consonants in words like /sx̩s/ seal fat. Miyako in Japan is similar, with /f̩ks̩/ to build and /ps̩ks̩/ to pull, each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic features, The manner of articulation is how air escapes from the vocal tract when the consonant or approximant sound is made. Manners include stops, fricatives, and nasals, the place of articulation is where in the vocal tract the obstruction of the consonant occurs, and which speech organs are involved
9.
Phonetic transcription
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Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, the pronunciation of words in many languages, as distinct from their written form, has undergone significant change over time. Pronunciation can also vary greatly among dialects of a language, standard orthography in some languages, particularly French, English, and Irish, is often irregular, and makes it difficult to predict pronunciation from spelling. For example, the words bough and through do not rhyme in English, in French, the sequence -ent is pronounced /ɑ̃/ in accent, but is silent in posent. Other languages, such as Spanish and Italian have a more consistent—though still imperfect—relationship between orthography and pronunciation, therefore, phonetic transcription can provide a function that orthography cannot. It displays a one-to-one relationship between symbols and sounds, unlike traditional writing systems, Phonetic transcription may aim to transcribe the phonology of a language, or it may be used to go further and specify the precise phonetic realisation. In all systems of transcription there is a distinction between broad transcription and narrow transcription, the difference between broad and narrow is a continuum. The advantage of the transcription is that it can help learners to get exactly the right sound. The disadvantage is that a transcription is rarely representative of all speakers of a language. Most Americans and Australians would pronounce the /t/ of little as a tap, some people in southern England would say /t/ as and/or the second /l/ as or something similar. A further disadvantage in less technical contexts is that narrow transcription involves a number of symbols that may be unfamiliar to non-specialists. The advantage of the transcription is that it usually allows statements to be made which apply across a more diverse language community. It is thus appropriate for the pronunciation data in foreign language dictionaries. A rule of thumb in many linguistics contexts is therefore to use a narrow transcription when it is necessary for the point being made, most phonetic transcription is based on the assumption that linguistic sounds are segmentable into discrete units that can be represented by symbols. The International Phonetic Alphabet is one of the most popular and well-known phonetic alphabets and it was originally created by primarily British language teachers, with later efforts from European phoneticians and linguists. It has changed from its earlier intention as a tool of foreign language pedagogy to an alphabet of linguists. It is currently becoming the most often seen alphabet in the field of phonetics and this is sometimes labeled the Americanist phonetic alphabet, but this is misleading because it has always been widely used for languages outside the Americas. The difference between these alphabets and IPA is small, although often the specially created characters of the IPA are abandoned in favour of existing characters with diacritics or digraphs
10.
Square bracket
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A bracket is a tall punctuation mark typically used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. The matched pair may be described as opening and closing, or left, forms include round, square, curly, and angle brackets, and various other pairs of symbols. Chevrons were the earliest type of bracket to appear in written English, desiderius Erasmus coined the term lunula to refer to the rounded parentheses, recalling the shape of the crescent moon. Some of the names are regional or contextual. Sometimes referred to as angle brackets, in cases as HTML markup. Occasionally known as broken brackets or brokets, ⸤ ⸥, ｢ ｣ – corner brackets ⟦ ⟧ – double square brackets, white square brackets Guillemets, ‹ › and « », are sometimes referred to as chevrons or angle brackets. The characters ‹ › and « », known as guillemets or angular quote brackets, are actually quotation mark glyphs used in several European languages, which one of each pair is the opening quote mark and which is the closing quote varies between languages. In English, typographers generally prefer to not set brackets in italics, however, in other languages like German, if brackets enclose text in italics, they are usually set in italics too. Parentheses /pəˈrɛnθᵻsiːz/ contain material that serves to clarify or is aside from the main point, a milder effect may be obtained by using a pair of commas as the delimiter, though if the sentence contains commas for other purposes, visual confusion may result. In American usage, parentheses are considered separate from other brackets. Parentheses may be used in writing to add supplementary information. They can also indicate shorthand for either singular or plural for nouns and it can also be used for gender neutral language, especially in languages with grammatical gender, e. g. he agreed with his physician. Parenthetical phrases have been used extensively in informal writing and stream of consciousness literature, examples include the southern American author William Faulkner as well as poet E. E. Cummings. Parentheses have historically been used where the dash is used in alternatives, such as parenthesis) is used to indicate an interval from a to c that is inclusive of a. That is, [5, 12) would be the set of all numbers between 5 and 12, including 5 but not 12. The numbers may come as close as they like to 12, including 11.999 and so forth, in some European countries, the notation [5, 12[ is also used for this. The endpoint adjoining the bracket is known as closed, whereas the endpoint adjoining the parenthesis is known as open, if both types of brackets are the same, the entire interval may be referred to as closed or open as appropriate. Whenever +∞ or −∞ is used as an endpoint, it is considered open
11.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
12.
Allophone
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In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language, the specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, but sometimes allophones occur in free variation. Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme will usually not change the meaning of a word, the term allophone was coined by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s. In doing so, he placed a cornerstone in consolidating early phoneme theory, the term was popularized by G. L. Trager and Bernard Bloch in a 1941 paper on English phonology and went on to become part of standard usage within the American structuralist tradition. Every time a users speech is vocalized for a phoneme, it will be slightly different from other utterances. This has led to debate over how real, and how universal. Only some of the variation is significant to speakers, when a specific allophone must be selected in a given context, the allophones are said to be complementary. In the case of complementary allophones, each allophone is used in a specific phonetic context, in other cases, the speaker is able to select freely from free variant allophones, based on personal habit or preference. Another example of an allophone is assimilation, wherein a phoneme is to more like the other phoneme. A tonic allophone is sometimes called an allotone, for example in the tone of Mandarin. Aspiration – strong explosion of breath, in English a voiceless plosive is aspirated whenever it stands as the consonant at the beginning of the stressed syllable or of the first, stressed or unstressed, syllable in a word. For example, as in pin and as in spin are allophones for the phoneme /p/ because they cannot distinguish words, English speakers treat them as the same sound, but they are different, the first is aspirated and the second is unaspirated. Many languages treat these two phones differently, see Aspirated consonant, section Usage patterns, nasal plosion – In English a plosive has nasal plosion when it is followed by a nasal, inside a word or across word boundary. Partial devoicing of sonorants – In English sonorants are partially devoiced when they follow a voiceless sound within the same syllable, complete devoicing of sonorants – In English a sonorant is completely devoiced when it follows an aspirated plosive. Partial devoicing of obstruents – In English, an obstruent is partially devoiced next to a pause or next to a voiceless sound. Retraction – in English /t, d, n, l/ are retracted before /r/, because the choice of allophone is seldom under conscious control, people may not realize they exist. The difference can also be felt by holding the hand in front of the lips. For a Mandarin speaker, to whom /t/ and /tʰ/ are separate phonemes, Allophones of English /l/ may be noticed if the light of leaf is contrasted with the dark of feel
