Why do languages gain and lose sounds?

I attended a fascinating talk recently by Professor Andrew Wedel, who has discovered how to predict whether a language will gain or lose sounds.

Which languages share sounds with English?

More accurately entitled, A typology of consonantal segment inventories of the world's most spoken languages, and also Welsh.

Evolutionary Phonology (Part 1 of 3)

Today's reading is Evolutionary Phonology by Juliette Blevins. ISBN: 0521804280

Intonation

What is intonation?

Intonation is the change in pitch which occurs over the course of a phrase. It is generally used to signify information about the utterance, like:

• whether it's a question or a statement
• which parts are new information and which are already known to both parties
• the attitude of the speaker towards the information

For example, you can use intonation (in combination with main stress, in English) to change...
"I never said she stole MY money" vs "I never said SHE stole my money"

Blackwell Companion to Phonology, Vol II: Chapter 57: Quantity-sensitivity

My notes on Blackwell Companion to Phonology, Vol II: Chapter 57: Quantity-sensitivity by Draga Zec.

On the perception of rhythmic grouping

How do we perceive groups of beats? How do we decide where the "first" beat of a group is, if the sounds keep going?

The 'Iambic/Trochaic law' is that if beats contrast in length, the most prominent beat will naturally come last in the group (iambic rhythm), but if they contrast in intensity, the most prominent will naturally come first (trochaic rhythm).

The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, Volume I: Chapter 1: Underlying Representations

We take a major diversion from 'Vowels and Consonants' to look at The Blackwell Companion to Phonology.

Since the purpose of these blogs posts is partly to communicate some linguistics to a interested but non-specialist audience, that introductory book was a good place to be. Alas, the other purpose was to provide incentives to get through my reading list, and that book is sufficiently introductory that writing each summary post took longer than reading the chapter! Now, we move onto something a little more dense, and I will need my note-taking...

(Apologies for any Atlantic spelling that follows - the book is in American English, and I appear to be randomly alternating between copying out quotes verbatim, and replacing the spelling with my own...)

Optimality theory

Today, an introduction to Optimality Theory, taken from Optimality Theory: A Reader, edited by John McCarthy.

A survey of word accentual patterns in the languages of the world

The next few months' reading is A survey of word accentual patterns in the languages of the world edited by Harry van der Hulst, Rob Goedemans and Ellen van Zanten. ISBN: 9783110196313

I have had an interesting voyage to get to this book, not least because I kept assuming it had the word 'stress' somewhere in the title. It is the Book of the Database: the StressTyp database, to be precise. (You see why I thought the title contained the words "Typological survey of stress".)

I do not intend to cover all 10 chapters on different language families this week, but I expect I will keep coming back to it. This week, we look at Chapter 1, an overview of word accents.

Phonetics and phonology

If you have ever seen Pygmalion, or more likely My Fair Lady, then you may be familiar with the Professor of Phonetics. The study of human speech sounds is nowadays split into two fields: phonetics and phonology.

Phonetics is the study of acoustics and articulation: How, physically, are various sounds made? How do we recognise which are which? Which sounds are easier to make? Do people aim for individual sounds, or for whole phrases? What is 'stress'? Is it the same in every language?

Phonology is the study of the human perception of speech sounds.
A phoneme is what speakers perceive to be a sound of their language. I would say "it's a letter", but no writing system actually uses one-letter-per-phoneme (except the International Phonetic Alphabet, designed for this purpose). Still, it's close enough: /l/, /t/, /i/, and /n/ are all phonemes.