| cherology | This word was coined for sign languages. It only lasted a few years before "phonology" was used for both signed and spoken languages. "cher" means hand, as "phon" means sound. |
| closed (syllable) | A syllable which ends in a consonant |
| coda | The end of a syllable; the consonants after the nucleus. |
| cognates | Words of similar pronunciation and meaning in different languages, derived from the same root |
| comparative method | Reconstructing a proto-language by comparing cognates in its daughter languages |
| gloss | Literal translation of a word or phrase. Frequently used in syntax, morphology or sign language linguistics to demonstrate word order and the like. |
| morpheme | A meaningful part of a word. Some words are monomorphemic - like 'word' - whilst others are polymorphemic: 'others' contains 'other' and 's' (meaning 'plural'). Anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism is a famously long example. |
| onset | The start of a syllable - the bit that's not the rhyme. Onsets always increase in sonority from beginning to end. |
| nucleus | The peak of sonority in a syllable. There is a minimum sonority threshold for the nucleus: in English it is 'nasal' - as in 'but(to)-n' |
| phoneme | A sound, like /b/, /t/, /i/. Not a letter: ph in English is a single phoneme, /f/. |
| phonetics | The study of speech sounds, as physics thinks about them. |
| phonology | "Phon-ology", the study of speech sounds, as the human brain thinks about them. (Or of signs - see also cherology.) |
| rhyme | The rhyme is part of a syllable. It consists of the nucleus and the coda. (It's the part that rhymes!) |
| sonority | Perceptually salience: often loudness, but it's debated. The 'sonority hierarchy' from low to high is obstruents, nasals, glides, vowels. |
| syllable | The domain of stress and phonotactics. Whilst quite intuitively obvious to English speakers, the technical definition of a syllable is under some debate. |
| UG | See Universal Grammar |
| Universal Grammar | "Universal Grammar" is the inbuilt linguistics knowledge that humans have. A large part of modern linguistics is figuring out what, if anything, is part of UG, and what is learnable given the input and other human abilities (e.g. rhythm, auditory and visual processing and the like). |
| |