Phonotactics

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 exa

In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the first syllable (prothesis), the last syllable (paragoge), or between two syllabic sounds in a word. The opposite process in which one or more sounds are removed is referred to as syncope or elision.

Czech and Slovak tongue-twister

loss of one or more sounds from the beginning of a word, especially the loss of an unstressed vowel

addition of a sound or syllable at the beginning of a word without changing the word's meaning or the rest of its structure

Phonaesthetics (also spelled phonesthetics in North America) is the study of the beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words. The term was first used in this sense, perhaps by during the mid-20th century and derives . Speech sounds have many aesthetic qualities, some of which are subjectively regarded as euphonious (pleasing) or cacophonous (displeasing). Phonaesthetics remains a budding and often subjective field of study, with no scientifically or otherwise formally established definition; today, it mostly exists as a marginal branch of psychology, p

group of consonants which have no intervening vowel

Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek and ) is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters and vowel sequences by means of phonotactic constraints.

Syllabification () or syllabication (), also known as hyphenation, is the separation of a word into syllables, whether spoken, written or signed.

consonant which either forms a syllable by itself or is the nucleus of a syllable

linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the optimal satisfaction of conflicting constraints

hierarchical ranking of speech sounds

thumb | right | Cover of the October 1905 issue of Jabberwock: a Monthly Magazine for Boys and Girls A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning. It is a specific type of nonce word, or even more narrowly a nonsense word, composed of a combination of phonemes which nevertheless conform to the language's phonotactic rules. It is thus a kind of vocable: utterable but meaningless.

language in which words tend to be monosyllabic, e.g. Chinese and languages of Southeast Asia

phonological process where voiced obstruents become voiceless before voiceless consonants or in pausa; occurs in Catalan, German, Dutch, Breton, Russian, Turkish, Wolof, etc.; e.g.: German Bad [baːt] > Bäder [ˈbɛːdɐ]; Turkish çicek > çiçeği

phonetic sound change

relation between rules in linguistics

situational pronunciation of "r" in non-rhotic varieties of English

in linguistics, a principle that outlines the structure of a syllable