School
Phonology
Overview
Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics) is the branch of linguistics that concerns how languages organize the foundational elements that make their words. In spoken languages, these are phonemes like vowel and consonant sounds that affect meaning. Examples of this effect can be found in comparisons of English words like bat and gnat. In sign languages, these are components of signs such as hand shape and location. Examples can be found in comparisons of American Sign Language signs glossed as CAR and WHICH (hand shape contrasts) and APPLE and ONION (location contrasts). At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but now it may relate to any linguistic analysis either:
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct succession without any intermediate inflectional elements to modify their meaning. Philologists usually call such languages 'root-languages,' because a sound complex that carries the essential meaning of a word, apart from all modifying elements, is called by their science a verbal root.
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Phonology is.
This process of composition is sometimes found in its incipient stage—a stage in which the component words are temporarily united to signify some unnamed object, and do not (from lack of frequent use) permanently cohere. But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what Phonology is.
Ants appear to be able to communicate a certain amount of information by means of their antennae. Probably writing itself, which we now regard as merely a way of representing speech, was originally an independent language, as it has remained to this day in China. Writing seems to have consisted originally of pictures, which gradually became conventionalized, coming in time to represent syllables, and finally letters…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what Phonology is.
Philosophers who discussed Phonology
Related ideas
- Ferdinand de Saussure
- Hebrew language
- Ancient Greek
- Psycholinguistics
- Morpheme
- Louis Hjelmslev
- Minimal pair
- Bengali language
- Noam Chomsky
- Linguistics
- Phoneme
- Parameter
- Perception
- Quechuan languages
- Roman Jakobson
- Syntax
- Sign language
- Nikolai Trubetzkoy
- Vowel
- Thai language
- -logy
- Arabic
- Speech perception
Place in the tradition
Part of Greek language.