Phonology in the context of Ejective

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages), phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language, and analogous systems of sign languages), and pragmatics (how the context of use contributes to meaning). Subdisciplines such as biolinguistics (the study of the biological variables and evolution of language) and psycholinguistics (the study of psychological factors in human language) bridge many of these divisions.

Linguistics encompasses many branches and subfields that span both theoretical and practical applications. Theoretical linguistics is concerned with understanding the universal and fundamental nature of language and developing a general theoretical framework for describing it. Applied linguistics seeks to utilize the scientific findings of the study of language for practical purposes, such as developing methods of improving language education and literacy.

A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (margins, which are most often consonants). In phonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language: its prosody or poetic metre. Properties such as stress, tone, and reduplication operate on syllables and their parts. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite. Most languages of the world use relatively simple syllable structures that often alternate between vowels and consonants.

Despite being present in virtually all human languages, syllables still have no precise definition that is valid for all known languages. A common criterion for finding syllable boundaries is native-speaker intuition, but individuals sometimes disagree on them.

A phoneme (/ˈfoʊniːm/) is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contain phonemes (or the spatial-gestural equivalent in sign languages), and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes. Phonemes are studied under phonology, a branch of the discipline of linguistics (a field encompassing language, writing, speech and related matters).

Phonemes are often represented, when written, as a glyph (a character) enclosed within two forward-sloping slashes /. So, for example, /k/ represents the phoneme or sound used in the beginning of the English language word cat (as opposed to, say, the /b/ of bat).

In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone. The terms stress and accent are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called pitch accent, and when produced through length alone, it is called quantitative accent. When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called stress accent or dynamic accent; English uses what is called variable stress accent.

Since stress can be realised through a wide range of phonetic properties, such as loudness, vowel length, and pitch (which are also used for other linguistic functions), it is difficult to define stress solely phonetically.

Vernacular is the ordinary, informal, spoken form of a language or dialect, particularly when perceived as having lower social status or less prestige than standard language, which is more codified, institutionally promoted, literary, or formal. More narrowly, any particular variety of a natural language that does not hold a widespread high-status perception, and sometimes even carries social stigma, is also called a vernacular, vernacular dialect, nonstandard dialect, etc. and is typically its speakers' native variety. Regardless of any such stigma, all nonstandard dialects are full-fledged varieties of language with their own consistent grammatical structure, sound system, body of vocabulary, etc.

In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology, and syntax, together with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to study grammar: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar.

Fluency in a particular language variety involves a speaker internalizing these rules, many or most of which are acquired by observing other speakers, as opposed to intentional study or instruction. Much of this internalization occurs during early childhood; learning a language later in life usually involves more direct instruction. The term grammar can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writers rather than individuals. Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, English grammar could describe those rules followed by every one of the language's speakers. At smaller scales, it may refer to rules shared by smaller groups of speakers.

A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition. Some specific definitions of the term "word" are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations.

The concept of "word" is distinguished from that of a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of language that has a meaning, even if it cannot stand on its own. Words are made out of at least one morpheme. Morphemes can also be joined to create other words in a process of morphological derivation. In English and many other languages, the morphemes that make up a word generally include at least one root (such as "rock", "god", "type", "writ", "can", "not") and possibly some affixes ("-s", "un-", "-ly", "-ness"). Words with more than one root ("[type][writ]er", "[cow][boy]s", "[tele][graph]ically") are called compound words. Contractions ("can't", "would've") are words formed from multiple words made into one. In turn, words are combined to form other elements of language, such as phrases ("a red rock", "put up with"), clauses ("I threw a rock"), and sentences ("I threw a rock, but missed").

The concept of communicative competence, as developed in linguistics, originated in response to perceived inadequacy of the notion of linguistic competence. That is, communicative competence encompasses a language user's grammatical knowledge of syntax, morphology, phonology and the like, but reconceives this knowledge as a functional, social understanding of how and when to use utterances appropriately.

Communicative language teaching is a pedagogical application of communicative competence.

A constructed language is a language for communication between humans (i.e. not with or between computers) but unlike most languages that naturally emerge from human interaction, is intentionally devised by a person or group for a particular purpose. The term constructed language is often shortened to conlang and, as a relatively broad term, it encompasses subcategories including: fictional, artificial, engineered, planned and invented languages. Conlangs may include aspects reminiscent of natural language including phonology, grammar, orthography, and vocabulary. Interlinguistics includes the study of constructed languages.

Urdu (اُرْدُو) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily in South Asia. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also an official Eighth Schedule language in India, the status and cultural heritage of which are recognised by the Constitution of India. It also has an official status in several Indian states.

Urdu and Hindi share a common, predominantly Sanskrit- and Prakrit-derived, vocabulary base, phonology, syntax, and grammar, making them mutually intelligible during colloquial communication. The common base of the two languages is sometimes referred to as the Hindi–Urdu or Hindustani language, and Urdu has been described as a Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language. While formal Urdu draws literary, political, and technical vocabulary from Persian, formal Hindi draws these aspects from Sanskrit; consequently, the two languages' mutual intelligibility effectively decreases as the factor of formality increases.

Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, is the reconstructed ancestral proto-language of all known Celtic languages, and a descendant of Proto-Indo-European. It is not attested in writing but has been partly reconstructed through the comparative method. Proto-Celtic is generally thought to have been spoken between 1300 and 800 BC, after which it began to split into different languages. Proto-Celtic is often associated with the Urnfield culture and particularly with the Hallstatt culture. Celtic languages share common features with Italic languages that are not found in other branches of Indo-European, suggesting the possibility of an earlier Italo-Celtic linguistic unity.

Proto-Celtic is currently being reconstructed through the comparative method by relying on later Celtic languages. Though Continental Celtic presents much substantiation for Proto-Celtic phonology, and some for its morphology, recorded material is too scanty to allow a secure reconstruction of syntax, though some complete sentences are recorded in the Continental Gaulish and Celtiberian. So, the main sources for reconstruction come from Insular Celtic languages with the oldest literature found in Old Irish and Middle Welsh, dating back to authors flourishing in the 6th century AD.

There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into several groups: Mandarin, Wu, Min, Xiang, Gan, Jin, Hakka and Yue, though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but reflect common phonological developments from Middle Chinese.

Chinese varieties have the greatest differences in their phonology, and to a lesser extent in vocabulary and syntax. Southern varieties tend to have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants. All have phonemic tones, with northern varieties tending to have fewer distinctions than southern ones. Many have tone sandhi, with the most complex patterns in the coastal area from Zhejiang to eastern Guangdong.

Sanskrit (/ˈsænskrɪt/; stem form संस्कृत; nominal singular संस्कृतम्, saṃskṛtam,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism. It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture, and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting effect on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies.

Sanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo-Aryan language varieties. The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in the Rigveda, a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 and 1200 BCE by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating east from the mountains of what is today northern Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and into northwestern India. Vedic Sanskrit interacted with the preexisting ancient languages of the subcontinent, absorbing names of newly encountered plants and animals; in addition, the ancient Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit's phonology and syntax. Sanskrit can also more narrowly refer to Classical Sanskrit, a refined and standardized grammatical form that emerged in the mid-1st millennium BCE and was codified in the most comprehensive of ancient grammars, the Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight chapters') of Pāṇini. The greatest dramatist in Sanskrit, Kālidāsa, wrote in classical Sanskrit, and the foundations of modern arithmetic were first described in classical Sanskrit. The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, however, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE, and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit. In the following centuries, Sanskrit became tradition-bound, stopped being learned as a first language, and ultimately stopped developing as a living language.

As used for Egyptology, transliteration of Ancient Egyptian is the process of converting (or mapping) texts written as Egyptian language symbols to alphabetic symbols representing uniliteral hieroglyphs or their hieratic and demotic counterparts. This process facilitates the publication of texts where the inclusion of photographs or drawings of an actual Egyptian document is impractical.

Transliteration is not the same as transcription. Transliteration is the representation of written symbols in a consistent way in a different writing system, while transcription indicates the pronunciation of a text. For the case of Ancient Egyptian, precise details of the phonology are not known completely. Transcription systems for Ancient Egyptian do exist, but they rely on linguistic reconstruction (depending on evidence from the Coptic language and other details) and are thus theoretical in nature. Egyptologists rely on transliteration in scientific publications. Egyptologists also call the process of converting hieratic texts to hieroglyphic text as "transcription."

In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning. Morphemes include roots that can exist as words by themselves, but also categories such as affixes that can only appear as part of a larger word. For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching. Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech, and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number, tense, and aspect. Concepts such as productivity are concerned with how speakers create words in specific contexts, which evolves over the history of a language.

The basic fields of linguistics broadly focus on language structure at different "scales". Morphology is considered to operate at a scale larger than phonology, which investigates the categories of speech sounds that are distinguished within a spoken language, and thus may constitute the difference between a morpheme and another. Conversely, syntax is concerned with the next-largest scale, and studies how words in turn form phrases and sentences. Morphological typology is a distinct field that categorises languages based on the morphological features they exhibit.