A Phonological And Prosodical Contrastive Study

Currently, there are an estimated 64 million speakers of Cantonese compared to the 1 million Taishanese speakers in Taishan and over 1.3 million Taishanese speakers in other places such as the United States, Canada, and Australia.

We are all members of a social group and members of `society´ as a whole. People interact in many ways and communication is just about the most common and among the most important. Whatever is meaningful to a group, from their everyday life to their traditions constitutes their very own culture and is generally respected by all group members. Language is only one of such items. For ethnic minority groups that may have a language of their own, their language is a cornerstone in their culture.

For many years now, Hmong clan leaders have felt that the Hmong language is slowly deteriorating throughout newer generations. First, it began with the writing, and then it slowly advanced to the loss of speaking the language altogether. The loss of this beautiful, perishing language hasn’t slowed down as the English language continues to globally dominate the world. I have watched this dispute occur throughout my life as distant relatives question my parent’s way of raising my siblings and I too not speak Hmong, therefore creating tension within my sense of self, and culture.

I will determine whether [æ] and [eʌ] appear to be allophonic or contrastive by examining those target sounds in “Dataset B” and “Dataset A”. Both sounds are present in the datasets but they are never seen together in the same word. The environments of the sounds are determined in (i) and organized by sound to see if there are any patterns that arise.

In Vanishing Voices by Russ Rymer, the author gives readers an in depth overview of the significant loss in the number of languages over the years. “One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. What is lost when a language goes silent?” he asks. A major argument Rymer includes in his essay is that languages are seeming to “compete” with one another. Parents children who speak tribal languages encourage their children to break away and learn to speak major languages such as English, Spanish, or

It has been speculated an estimate of as many as 100,000 languages had existed prior to the dawn of agriculture. Currently, approximately only 6,500 to 6,900 languages are spoken today worldwide. Correspondingly, these spoken languages are not evenly distributed. Whereas, 230 are spoken in Europe and 2,197 are spoken in the continent of Asia. Like

The third chapter of Don P. Ester's book, Sound Connections, introduces many systems for teaching pitch and rhythm. The chapter discusses the benefits and disadvantages of the many systems, such as, Ester starts by introducing his idea of the criteria for selecting effective syllable systems. One of his many points is, “The syllables must connect very efficiently with the aural syntax of music, allowing the learner to easily link syllables to patterns before encountering notation.” The next being “The syllables must eventually link to musical symbols in a practical and intuitive manner.” The last being, “The syllables should be appropriate for use with all ages.” Ester also outlines specific guidelines for tonal and rhythmic systems that vary from each other. The most successful systems chosen by Ester meet these criteria points, and are outlined as to why they are the most successful.

Approximately 7,000 languages exist in the world today. Scientistsestimate that by the year 2100, only 200 languages will remain. Languagescan go extinct for a variety of reasons. In the modern world, lesser knownlanguages are often overtaken by more dominant languages. Other languagesare spoken by such few people, they simply go extinct once the remainingindividuals are no longer living. Languages can only survive if peopledocument them and continue to speak them. In a world where 85 of the global population speak one or more of only100 languages, it is often surprising to learn that thousands of languagesexist in the world. Many of these languages are found in indigenouspopulations. Approximately, 400 Native American languages existed beforethe

Throughout the course of the semester, I have conducted research into the Cayuga language, a Northern Iroquoian idiom of ~250-300 speakers based primarily in southern Ontario, Canada (Ethnologue 2015). In the first study, I looked into the basic sociolinguistic aspects affecting this language, focusing primarily on efforts to revitalize it. It is labeled by the anthropological site Ethnologue as Moribund, and by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as Extinct (Ethnologue 2015). In part one of the current paper, I will reiterate some of the points that I made previously, while further exploring the topic of language revitalization. In the second study, I focused on the Cayuga grammar system, spending considerable time looking at the phonetics and phonology of the language, as there is not much other literature available on the morphology or syntax of the language. I briefly glossed over the prosodic system in Cayuga, later

According to Freeman, phonological understanding is recognizing a word and be able to pronounce it. This exercise addresses this in the beginning from reading or listening exercises,

Flipsen Jr, P., & Parker, R. G. (2008). Phonological patterns in the conversational speech of

7. In each of the following pairs of words, the bold italicized sounds differ by one or more phonetic properties (features). Give the IPA symbol for each italicized sound, state their differences and, in addition, state what properties they have in common. Example: phone—phonic The o in phone is mid, tense, round. The o in phonic is low, unround. Both are back vowels. bath bathe æ = Low, central, unrounded e = Mid, tense, unrounded reduce reduction ə = Low, lax, rounded v = Low, lax, unrounded cool cold u = High, tense, rounded a = Low, tense, unrounded wife wives e = Mid, tense, unrounded i = High, front, tense cats dogs æ = Low, central, unrounded o = Mid, back, rounded impolite indecent o = Front, lax, unrounded ɛ = Mid, lax, unrounded

The Khan- Lewis Phonological Analysis (KLPA- 2) was used to further clarify and analyze Jay’s speech sound production errors and was interpreted from the GFTA-2 data. A raw score of 34 yielded a standard score of 59, placing him in the 4th percentile, with a confidence interval of 53-65 at 95%. These results measure two standard deviations below the mean indicating a moderately severe phonological processing disorder. Jay exhibited 26% out of 31 in stopping of fricative and affricative, 29% out of 31 in liquid simplification, 15% of 26 in cluster simplification, 4% of 44 deletions of final consonants, and 0% of 26 syllable reduction errors. In place and manner processes, his results revealed 1% of 19 in velar fronting, 70% of 9 in palatal fronting,

Before analyzing its first worth noting how language sounds works. Phonemes are a unit of sound languages. For words, there are also distinctive

For this assessment I have been required to compare English with another language. I have decided to choose Mandarin as my language of choice. A major elements of languages will be compared in this essay. That being phonology. Phonology is defined as being “the study of the way speech sounds form patterns”.(Victoria Fromkin 2009). As (Hammond 1999) describes, every spoken language has a unique system whereby sounds are organised. This unique pattern of pattern can be termed phonology and varies widely in geographical and social differences.