In linguistics and especially phonology, functional load, or phonemic load, is the collection of words that contain a certain pronunciation feature (a phoneme) that makes distinctions between other words. Phonemes with a high functional load distinguish a large number of words from other words, and phonemes with a low functional load distinguish relatively fewer words from other words. The omission or mishearing of features with a high functional load thus leads to more confusion than features with a low functional load.
The term "functional load" goes back to the days of the Prague School; references to it can be found in the work of Vilém Mathesius in 1929. Its most vocal advocate was André Martinet, a historical linguist who claimed it was a factor in the likelihood of a phonological merger. [1]
The first suggested measurement for functional load was the number of minimal pairs, but that does not take into account word frequency and is difficult to generalize beyond binary phonemic oppositions. Charles Hockett proposed an information theoretic definition in 1955, [2] which has since been generalized. [3] Now, with a large text corpus, one can compute the functional load of any phonological contrast including distinctive features, suprasegmentals, and distinctions between groups of phonemes. For instance, the functional load of tones in Mandarin Chinese is as high as that of vowels: the information lost when all tones sound alike is as much as that lost when all vowels sound alike. [4]
Martinet predicted that perceptually similar pairs of phonemes with low functional load would merge. This has not been proved empirically; indeed, all empirical tests have come out against it; for example, /n/ merged with /l/ in Cantonese in word-initial position in the late 20th century although of all the consonants in binary opposition to /n/, only the /n/-/m/ opposition had a higher functional load than the /n/-/l/ opposition. [3]
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English vowels, for example, have a very high functional load. There are innumerable sets of words distinguished just by their vowels, such as pin, pen, pan, pun, pain, pine. Voicing is similar, as can be seen in pat - bad, few - view. Speakers who do not control these differences make it very difficult for others to understand them.
However, although voicing is generally important in English, the voicing difference between the two fricatives written ⟨th⟩, /θ,ð/, has a very low functional load: it is difficult to find meaningful distinctions dependent solely on this difference. One of the few examples is thigh vs. thy although the two can be distinguished from context alone. Similar is the difference of /dʒ/ (written ⟨j⟩, ⟨ge⟩, etc.) versus /ʒ/ (resulting from /z+j/, or the ⟨j⟩, ⟨ge⟩, etc. in some recent French loanwords), as in virgin vs. version. The difference between the two ⟨ng⟩ sounds, [ŋ,ŋɡ], found in singer and finger, is so unimportant that it makes no practical difference if one confuses them, and some dialects pronounce the sounds the same in both words. The functional load is nearly zero, which is unsurprising since the phoneme /ŋ/ originated as a coalescence of [ŋɡ] when it was word-final.
An ongoing example would be the merger of the AIR and EAR vowels in New Zealand English. The phonetic similarity between words like here and hare does not seem to hamper oral communication greatly if context is provided. Therefore, those vowels have low functional load in New Zealand English despite their high frequency of occurrences in that dialect. The distinction is fully maintained in nearby Australian English, where many find comedy and confusion in mergers such as sheep-sharing vs. sheep-shearing.
The functional load of tone in Mandarin Chinese is approximately equal to the functional load of vowels. The loss of information when all tones sound alike in Mandarin is approximately equal to that when all vowels sound alike.
By contrast, in many Bantu languages, the tones have a low functional load, and in Swahili, tones have disappeared altogether.
In phonology, an allophone is one of multiple possible spoken sounds – or phones – or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosive and the aspirated form are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Thai. Similarly, in Spanish, and are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English.
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and [b], pronounced with the lips; and [d], pronounced with the front of the tongue; and [g], pronounced with the back of the tongue;, pronounced in the throat;, [v], and, pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and and, which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Contrasting with consonants are vowels.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate that two phones represent two separate phonemes in the language.
Morphophonology is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes when they combine to form words.
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme is a set of phones that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
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 the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress.
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds, typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. 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.
In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are the consonants y and w, in yes and west, respectively. Written in IPA, y and w are near to the vowels ee and oo in seen and moon, written in IPA. The term glide may alternatively refer to any type of transitional sound, not necessarily a semivowel.
In phonetics, palatalization or palatization is a way of pronouncing a consonant in which part of the tongue is moved close to the hard palate. Consonants pronounced this way are said to be palatalized and are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by affixing the letter ⟨ʲ⟩ to the base consonant. Palatalization cannot minimally distinguish words in most dialects of English, but it may do so in languages such as Russian, Japanese, Norwegian (dialects), Võro, Irish and Kashmiri.
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic spellings were used.
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel /ɑ̃/ or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced without nasalization.
The phonology of Vietnamese features 19 consonant phonemes, with 5 additional consonant phonemes used in Vietnamese's Southern dialect, and 4 exclusive to the Northern dialect. Vietnamese also has 14 vowel nuclei, and 6 tones that are integral to the interpretation of the language. Older interpretations of Vietnamese tones differentiated between "sharp" and "heavy" entering and departing tones. This article is a technical description of the sound system of the Vietnamese language, including phonetics and phonology. Two main varieties of Vietnamese, Hanoi and Saigon, which are slightly different to each other, are described below.
This article describes the phonology of the Somali language.
Proto-Polynesian is the hypothetical proto-language from which all the modern Polynesian languages descend. It is a daughter language of the Proto-Austronesian language. Historical linguists have reconstructed the language using the comparative method, in much the same manner as with Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic. This same method has also been used to support the archaeological and ethnographic evidence which indicates that the ancestral homeland of the people who spoke Proto-Polynesian was in the vicinity of Tonga, Samoa, and nearby islands.
A diaphoneme is an abstract phonological unit that identifies a correspondence between related sounds of two or more varieties of a language or language cluster. For example, some English varieties contrast the vowel of late with that of wait or eight. Other English varieties contrast the vowel of late or wait with that of eight. This non-overlapping pair of phonemes from two different varieties can be reconciled by positing three different diaphonemes: A first diaphoneme for words like late, a second diaphoneme for words like wait, and a third diaphoneme for words like eight.
The phonology of Bengali, like that of its neighbouring Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, is characterised by a wide variety of diphthongs and inherent back vowels.
Standard Cantonese pronunciation is that of Guangzhou, also known as Canton, capital of Guangdong Province. Hong Kong Cantonese is related to Guangzhou dialect, and they diverge only slightly. Yue dialects in other parts of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces like Taishanese, may be considered divergent to a greater degree.
The Babanki, or Kejom, language is a Bantoid language that is spoken by the Babanki people of the Western Highlands of Cameroon.