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61-428: Given its long history and the isolation of the region in which it is spoken, Wenzhounese is so unusual in its phonology that it has the reputation of being the least comprehensible dialect for an average Mandarin speaker. It preserves a large amount of vocabulary of classical Chinese lost elsewhere, earning itself the nickname "the living fossil ", and has distinct grammatical differences from Mandarin. Wenzhounese

122-608: A Niger-Congo language spoken in Ghana , has two tones: high and low. The low tone is default. In Akan, tones at morpheme boundaries assimilate to each other through tone sandhi, the first tone of the second morpheme changing to match the final tone of the first morpheme. For example: Tone sandhi, especially the case of the Taiwanese Hokkien tone circle, often lacks intuitive phonetic explanations. Specifically, sandhi rules may target classes of phones not previously identified as natural,

183-547: A bidirectional tone into a one-directional tone. Tone sandhi is a type of sandhi , which refers to fusional changes, and is derived from the Sanskrit word for "joining." Tone sandhi occurs to some extent in nearly all tonal languages , manifesting itself in different ways. Tonal languages, characterized by their use of pitch to affect meaning, appear all over the world, especially in the Niger-Congo language family of Africa, and

244-456: A certain environment, whether or not the new tone is already present in the surrounding words or morphemes . Many languages spoken in China have tone sandhi; some of it quite complex. Southern Min (Minnan), which includes Hokkien , Taiwanese , and Teochew , has a complex system, with in most cases every syllable changing into a different tone, and which tone it turns into sometimes depending on

305-675: A derivational process known as changed tone , which only applies in certain semantic domains. The word tong4 ( /tʰɔːŋ˨˩/ ; 糖 ) means "sugar", whereas the derived word tong2 ( /tʰɔːŋ˧˥/ ; also written 糖 ) means "candy". Such a change is not triggered by the phonological environment of the tone, and therefore is not an example of sandhi. Standard Chinese (Standard Mandarin) features several tone sandhi rules: Yatzachi Zapotec , an Oto-Manguean language spoken in Mexico, has three tones: high, middle and low. The three tones, along with separate classifications for morpheme categories, contribute to

366-706: A few vocabulary items. An example would be the word for "garbage" ( 垃圾 ), which is /ʔlutsuu/ in the Baimen dialect and /ʔladʒee/ in the Wangzhai dialect. Numbers in Oujiang Dialects (The long vowels transcribe the lengthened ru tone.) A translation of part of the New Testament , specifically the four gospels and the book of Acts , was published in 1894 under the title " Chaò-Chḯ Yi-sû Chī-tuh Sang Iah Sing Shī: Sz̀ fuh-iang tà sź-du 'ae-djüe fa üe-tsiu t'û¹-'ò ", with

427-492: A focus on linguistic structure independent of phonetic realization or semantics. In 1968, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English (SPE), the basis for generative phonology . In that view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features . The features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant , and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from

488-522: A given language) and phonological alternation (how the pronunciation of a sound changes through the application of phonological rules , sometimes in a given order that can be feeding or bleeding , ) as well as prosody , the study of suprasegmentals and topics such as stress and intonation . The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones. The same principles have been applied to

549-503: A left-dominant or right-dominant system, depending on whether the leftmost or rightmost item keeps its tone. In a language of the right-dominant system, the right-most syllable of a word retains its citation tone . All the other syllables of the word must take their sandhi form. Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi and Taiwanese Hokkien tone sandhi are both right-dominant. In a left-dominant system, the leftmost tone tends to spread rightward. Shanghainese

610-619: A more abstract level, as a component of morphemes ; these units can be called morphophonemes , and analysis using this approach is called morphophonology . In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, or replace one another in different forms of the same morpheme ( allomorphs ), as well as, for example, syllable structure, stress , feature geometry , tone , and intonation . Phonology also includes topics such as phonotactics (the phonological constraints on what sounds can appear in what positions in

671-439: A pioneer in phonology, wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kitāb Al-Munṣif , Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab , and Kitāb Al-Khaṣāʾiṣ    [ ar ] . The study of phonology as it exists today is defined by the formative studies of the 19th-century Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay , who (together with his students Mikołaj Kruszewski and Lev Shcherba in

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732-682: A pronunciation of a word that best satisfies a list of constraints ordered by importance; a lower-ranked constraint can be violated when the violation is necessary in order to obey a higher-ranked constraint. The approach was soon extended to morphology by John McCarthy and Alan Prince and has become a dominant trend in phonology. The appeal to phonetic grounding of constraints and representational elements (e.g. features) in various approaches has been criticized by proponents of "substance-free phonology", especially by Mark Hale and Charles Reiss . An integrated approach to phonological theory that combines synchronic and diachronic accounts to sound patterns

793-557: A root or "couplet". The tone combinations are expressed here as a two digit number (high-low is represented as 13). Couplets are also classified into either class A or B, as well as verb or non-verb. A number of specific rules depending on these three factors determine tone change. One example of a rule follows: "Basic 31 becomes 11 when following any couplet of Class B but does not change after Class A (except that after 32(B') it optionally remains 31" ža²ʔa² (class B) "chiles" + ži³či¹ (class A) "dry" > ža²ʔa²ži¹či¹ "dry chiles" Akan ,

854-481: A somewhat more complicated system of tone sandhi than in Mandarin . There are two main rules for Yatzachi Zapotec tone sandhi, which apply in this order: Molinos Mixtec , another Oto-Manguean language, has a much more complicated system of tone sandhi. The language has three tones (high, mid, or low, or 1, 2, or 3, respectively), and all roots are disyllabic, meaning that there are nine possible combinations of tones for

915-557: A systematic study of the sounds in a language appears in the 4th century BCE Ashtadhyayi , a Sanskrit grammar composed by Pāṇini . In particular, the Shiva Sutras , an auxiliary text to the Ashtadhyayi , introduces what may be considered a list of the phonemes of Sanskrit, with a notational system for them that is used throughout the main text, which deals with matters of morphology , syntax and semantics . Ibn Jinni of Mosul ,

976-496: A tonal deictic morpheme. To convey the sense of "this", the classifier changes its tone to rù (dipping), and a voiced initial consonant is devoiced. For example, from /pa˧/ 'group' there is /pa˧˨˧/ 'this group', and from /le˧˩/ 'some (people)' there is /l̥e˧˨˧/ 'these (people)'. Wenzhounese is reputed to have been used during the Second Sino-Japanese War during wartime communication via code talkers and in

1037-409: A universally fixed set and have the binary values + or −. There are at least two levels of representation: underlying representation and surface phonetic representation. Ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation (the so-called surface form). An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of

1098-714: Is Patricia Donegan, Stampe's wife; there are many natural phonologists in Europe and a few in the US, such as Geoffrey Nathan. The principles of natural phonology were extended to morphology by Wolfgang U. Dressler , who founded natural morphology. In 1976, John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology . Phonological phenomena are no longer seen as operating on one linear sequence of segments, called phonemes or feature combinations but rather as involving some parallel sequences of features that reside on multiple tiers. Autosegmental phonology later evolved into feature geometry , which became

1159-521: Is among the most important works in the field from that period. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology , but the concept had also been recognized by de Courtenay. Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the archiphoneme . Another important figure in the Prague school was Roman Jakobson , one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century. Louis Hjelmslev 's glossematics also contributed with

1220-521: Is an example of a left-dominant system. The seven or eight tones of Hmong demonstrate several instances of tone sandhi. In fact the contested distinction between the seventh and eighth tones surrounds the very issue of tone sandhi (between glottal stop (-m) and low rising (-d) tones). High and high-falling tones (marked by -b and -j in the RPA orthography, respectively) trigger sandhi in subsequent words bearing particular tones. A frequent example can be found in

1281-545: Is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of phonetic alternations (what is now called allophony and morphophonology ) and may have had an influence on the work of Saussure, according to E. F. K. Koerner . An influential school of phonology in the interwar period was the Prague school . One of its leading members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy , whose Grundzüge der Phonologie ( Principles of Phonology ), published posthumously in 1939,

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1342-419: 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 or as large as an entire utterance. Phonological processes are unordered with respect to each other and apply simultaneously, but the output of one process may be the input to another. The second most prominent natural phonologist

1403-706: Is no dissimilation, explained by this being grammatically a lexicalized phrase rather than a compound. The HM shifts forward, with intermediate syllables becoming M (the tone the HM leaves off at): Although checked (MLM) syllables rarely change in compound words, they can change in phrases: "tall steel case" is underlyingly M.MLM.HM. The middle syllable shifts to HM, and sandhi operates on this *HM.HM sequence to produce HM.ML. The HM then shifts back, yielding /HM.M.ML/. Such behaviour has been used to support arguments that contour tones in languages like Chinese are single units and they are independent of vowels or other segments. Wenzhou has

1464-411: Is often an assimilatory or dissimilatory process. Mandarin Tone 3 sandhi, explained above, is an example of an Obligatory Contour Principle effect because it involves two tone 3 syllables next to each other. The first of the two tone 3's becomes a tone 2 to dissimilate from the other syllable. Sinologists sometimes use reversed Chao tone letters to indicate sandhi, with the left-facing letters of

1525-523: Is one of five varieties of Chinese other than Standard Mandarin used for broadcasting by China Radio International , alongside Cantonese , Hokkien , Teochew , and Hakka . Wenzhounese is part of the Wu group of Chinese dialects, sharing many linguistic features with them. These are spoken over the Zhejiang and south Jiangsu provinces. Wenzhounese is seen as a typical representative of southern Wu. Wenzhounese

1586-470: Is replaced by another in the event that the new tone is present elsewhere in the adjacent tones. Usually, these processes of assimilation occur from left to right. In some languages of West Africa, for example, an unaccented syllable takes the tone from the closest tone to its left. However, in East and Southeast Asia, "paradigmatic replacement" is a more common form of tone sandhi, as one tone changes to another in

1647-872: Is spoken primarily in Wenzhou and the surrounding southern portion of Zhejiang , China. To a lesser extent, it is also spoken in scattered pockets of Fujian in southeastern China. Overseas, it is spoken in increasingly larger communities in the United States in Flushing Chinatown in the Queens borough of New York City, and the Chinatowns in Brooklyn in New York City . Wenzhounese is also spoken by some Overseas Chinese communities in Europe, in particular Italy, France, and Spain. It

1708-403: Is the only contrasting feature (two words can have different meanings but with the only difference in pronunciation being that one has an aspirated sound where the other has an unaspirated one). Part of the phonological study of a language therefore involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers ) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what

1769-630: Is used more widely among the Chinese people in Italy than Mandarin. Over 80% of the Chinese diaspora that are resident in the city of Prato , Tuscany, were born in Zhejiang Province. Wenzhounese can be generally divided into the following three dialects: The most important difference between eastern Wenzhounese dialects such as Wencheng and Wenzhou proper are tonal differences (Wencheng has no falling tones) and

1830-687: The Kazan School ) shaped the modern usage of the term phoneme in a series of lectures in 1876–1877. The word phoneme had been coined a few years earlier, in 1873, by the French linguist A. Dufriche-Desgenettes . In a paper read at 24 May meeting of the Société de Linguistique de Paris , Dufriche-Desgenettes proposed for phoneme to serve as a one-word equivalent for the German Sprachlaut . Baudouin de Courtenay's subsequent work, though often unacknowledged,

1891-743: The Sino-Tibetan language family of East Asia, as well as other East Asian languages such as Kra-Dai , and Papuan languages . East and Southeast Asian languages tend to have larger tonal libraries compared to African languages. However, African languages frequently exhibit downdrift and mobility, forms of tone interaction. Tonal languages are also found in many Oto-Manguean and other languages of Central America, as well as in parts of North America (such as Athabaskan in British Columbia, Canada), and Europe. Many North American and African tonal languages undergo "syntagmatic displacement", as one tone

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1952-564: The Sino-Vietnamese War for programming military code . There is a common rhymed saying in China that reflects this comprehension difficulty: "Fear not the Heavens, fear not the Earth, but fear the Wenzhou man speaking Wenzhounese" ( 天 不 怕 ， 地 不 怕 ， 就怕 温州人 说 温州话 ). There are several sub-branches of Oujiang dialects, and some are not mutually intelligible with the Wenzhou city dialect and

2013-572: The Wencheng dialect, but neighboring dialects are often mutually intelligible. For example, there are 2 dialects spoken in Li'ao Village in the Ouhai District of Wenzhou: one spoken in Baimen ( 白門 ), where the local people have 姜 as their surname, and one spoken in Wangzhai ( 王宅 ), where local people have normally 王 or 黄 as their surname. Their dialects are almost fully mutually intelligible, except for

2074-400: The analysis of sign languages (see Phonemes in sign languages ), even though the sublexical units are not instantiated as speech sounds. Tone sandhi Tone sandhi is a phonological change that occurs in tonal languages. It involves changes to the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes, based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. This change typically simplifies

2135-412: The combination for numbering objects (ordinal number + classifier + noun): ib (one) + tus (classifier) + dev (dog) > ib tu g dev (note tone change on the classifier from -s to -g). Tone sandhi is compulsory as long as the environmental conditions that trigger it are met. It is not to be confused with tone changes that are due to derivational or inflectional morphology . For example, Cantonese has

2196-448: The concepts are now considered to apply universally to all human languages . The word "phonology" (as in " phonology of English ") can refer either to the field of study or to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the fundamental systems that a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax , its morphology and its lexicon . The word phonology comes from Ancient Greek φωνή , phōnḗ , 'voice, sound', and

2257-689: The conditioning environments may be disjoint, or the tone substitutions may occur without any reason. This is because waves of sound change have hidden the original phonetic motivation of the sandhi rule. In the case of Chinese varieties, though, Middle Chinese tones can be used as natural classes for tone sandhi rules in modern varieties, showing that diachronic information needs to be considered to understand tone sandhi. However, phonetic motivations have been identified for specific varieties. The phonetic unnaturalness of many tone sandhi processes have made it difficult for phonologists to express such processes with rules or constraints. Phonologically, tone sandhi

2318-465: The entire book in Romanized Wenzhou dialect. Phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages , their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety . At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of

2379-405: The extent to which they require allophones to be phonetically similar. There are also differing ideas as to whether this grouping of sounds is purely a tool for linguistic analysis, or reflects an actual process in the way the human brain processes a language. Since the early 1960s, theoretical linguists have moved away from the traditional concept of a phoneme, preferring to consider basic units at

2440-509: The field of phonology vary. Nikolai Trubetzkoy in Grundzüge der Phonologie (1939) defines phonology as "the study of sound pertaining to the system of language," as opposed to phonetics, which is "the study of sound pertaining to the act of speech" (the distinction between language and speech being basically Ferdinand de Saussure 's distinction between langue and parole ). More recently, Lass (1998) writes that phonology refers broadly to

2501-427: The final consonant of the syllable that bears it. Take for example Taiwanese varieties of Hokkien , which have two tonemes (numbered 4 and 8 in the diagram above) that occur in checked syllables (those ending in a stop consonant ) and five tonemes in syllables that do not end in a stop. In Taiwanese, within a phonological phrase , all its non- neutral-tone syllables save for the last undergo tone sandhi. Among

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2562-416: The generalizations above are in bold.) With a compound word of three syllables, the patterns above apply to the last two. The antepenultimate tonic syllable takes only two possible tones, by dissimilation : low if the following syllable (in sandhi form) starts high (HM), high otherwise. So, for example, the unusually long compound noun "daily necessities" (lit., 'firewood-rice-oil-salt-sauce-vinegar-tea') has

2623-473: The number of resulting tones is reduced by tone sandhi . Of the six phonetic tones, there are only fourteen lexical patterns created by two tonic syllables. With one exception, the shǎng and qù tones reduce to HM ( yīn qù ) before any other tone, and again with one exception, the rù tone does not interact with a following tone. The shǎng and rù tones change a preceding non- rù tone to HM, and are themselves never affected. (Sandhi that are exceptions to

2684-533: The phonological system of a language is necessarily an application of theoretical principles to analysis of phonetic evidence in some theories. The distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid-20th century. Some subfields of modern phonology have a crossover with phonetics in descriptive disciplines such as psycholinguistics and speech perception , which result in specific areas like articulatory phonology or laboratory phonology . Definitions of

2745-477: The retention of /f/ before /o/ : The tones of all other Oujiang dialects are similar to Wenzhounese. (Wenzhounese puu transcribes the lengthened entering tone .) / l / is lateral, and / j / is palatal . The only coda is the velar nasal , in /aŋ eŋ oŋ/ and syllabic [ŋ̩] . Wenzhou has three phonemic tones . While it has eight phonetic tones, most of these are predictable: The yīn–yáng tone split dating from Middle Chinese still corresponds to

2806-425: The same phoneme. First, interchanged allophones of the same phoneme can result in unrecognizable words. Second, actual speech, even at a word level, is highly co-articulated, so it is problematic to expect to be able to splice words into simple segments without affecting speech perception. Different linguists therefore take different approaches to the problem of assigning sounds to phonemes. For example, they differ in

2867-589: The same phonological category, that is of the phoneme /p/ . (Traditionally, it would be argued that if an aspirated [pʰ] were interchanged with the unaspirated [p] in spot , native speakers of English would still hear the same words; that is, the two sounds are perceived as "the same" /p/ .) In some other languages, however, these two sounds are perceived as different, and they are consequently assigned to different phonemes. For example, in Thai , Bengali , and Quechua , there are minimal pairs of words for which aspiration

2928-503: The same place and manner of articulation and differ in voicing only, were allophones of the same phoneme in English, but later came to belong to separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described in historical linguistics . The findings and insights of speech perception and articulation research complicate the traditional and somewhat intuitive idea of interchangeable allophones being perceived as

2989-552: The same, but there is restricted variation that accounts for differences in surface realizations. Principles are held to be inviolable, but parameters may sometimes come into conflict. Prominent figures in this field include Jonathan Kaye , Jean Lowenstamm, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Monik Charette , and John Harris. In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991, Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky developed optimality theory , an overall architecture for phonology according to which languages choose

3050-412: The sound inventory of the language is. The presence or absence of minimal pairs, as mentioned above, is a frequently used criterion for deciding whether two sounds should be assigned to the same phoneme. However, other considerations often need to be taken into account as well. The particular contrasts which are phonemic in a language can change over time. At one time, [f] and [v] , two sounds that have

3111-512: The standard theory of representation for theories of the organization of phonology as different as lexical phonology and optimality theory . Government phonology , which originated in the early 1980s as an attempt to unify theoretical notions of syntactic and phonological structures, is based on the notion that all languages necessarily follow a small set of principles and vary according to their selection of certain binary parameters . That is, all languages' phonological structures are essentially

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3172-400: The subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language, and in more narrow terms, "phonology proper is concerned with the function, behavior and organization of sounds as linguistic items." According to Clark et al. (2007), it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language , or the field of linguistics studying that use. Early evidence for

3233-507: The suffix -logy (which is from Greek λόγος , lógos , 'word, speech, subject of discussion'). Phonology is typically distinguished from phonetics , which concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds or signs of language. Phonology describes the way they function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. For many linguists, phonetics belongs to descriptive linguistics and phonology to theoretical linguistics , but establishing

3294-445: The syllable and the emphasis on segments. Furthermore, the generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural phonology is a theory based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969 and, more explicitly, in 1979. 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

3355-493: The syllables of a phonological word carry tone. In Wenzhounese there may be three such syllables, with the tone of any subsequent (post-tonic) syllables determined by the last of these. In addition, there may be pre-tonic syllables ( clitics ), which take a low tone. However, in Wenzhounese only one tonic word may exist in a prosodic unit ; all other words are reduced to low tone. Up to three tonic syllables may occur together, but

3416-413: The systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but now it may relate to any linguistic analysis either: Sign languages have a phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in spoken languages. The building blocks of signs are specifications for movement, location, and handshape. At first, a separate terminology was used for the study of sign phonology ("chereme" instead of "phoneme", etc.), but

3477-625: The unchecked syllables, tone 1 becomes 7, 7 becomes 3, 3 becomes 2, and 2 becomes 1. Tone 5 becomes 7 or 3, depending on dialect. Stopped syllables ending in ⟨-p⟩ , ⟨-t⟩ , or ⟨-k⟩ take the opposite tone (phonetically, a high tone becomes low, and a low tone becomes high) whereas syllables ending in a glottal stop (written as ⟨-h⟩ in Pe̍h-ōe-jī) drop their final consonant to become tone 2 or 3. Tone sandhi in Sinitic languages can be classified with

3538-411: The underlying tones Per sandhi, the last two syllables become L.L. The antepenult then dissimilates to H, and all pre-tonic syllables become L, for: At a phrasal level, these tones may separate, with a HM tone, for example, shifting to the beginning of a phrase. In the lexicalized phrase "radio receiver" ('wireless telephone tube'), the underlying tones are Per sandhi, the last two become HM.ML. There

3599-540: The voicing of the initial consonant in Wenzhou, and the shǎng tones are abrupt and end in glottal stop (this has been used as evidence for a similar situation independently posited for Old Chinese ). The rù tones, however, are unusual in being distinct despite having lost their final stops; in addition, the vowel has lengthened , and the tone has become more complex than the other tones (though some speakers may simplify them to low falling or rising tones). The shǎng and rù tones are barely distinguishable apart from

3660-465: The voicing of the initial consonant, and so are phonetically closer to two tones than four. Chen (2000) summarizes the tones as M & ML ( ping ), MH ( shǎng ), HM & L ( qu ), and dipping (MLM, rù ); not only are the píng and qù pairs obviously distinct phonetically, but they behave as four different tones in the ways they undergo tone sandhi . As in Shanghainese , in Wenzhounese only some of

3721-526: Was initiated with Evolutionary Phonology in recent years. An important part of traditional, pre-generative schools of phonology is studying which sounds can be grouped into distinctive units within a language; these units are known as phonemes . For example, in English, the "p" sound in pot is aspirated (pronounced [pʰ] ) while that in spot is not aspirated (pronounced [p] ). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations ( allophones , which cannot give origin to minimal pairs ) of

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