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Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and is largely divided into two major fields: theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist.
Theoretical (or general) linguistics encompasses seven major sub-fields: phonetics (the study of the isolated sounds of speech), phonology (the study of speech sound systems and their mental representations), morphology (the study of the grammatical rules for word formation), syntax (the study of word order), lexis (the study of words), semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (the study of meaning in context) which, together, allow for a description of the way a language works to convey meaning from one speaker to another. Applied linguistics encompasses diverse fields such as language education, second language acquisition, effect of society on language, or language's relationship to psychology, and so on.
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One of the most important aspects of Irish phonology is that almost all consonants come in pairs, with one having a "broad" pronunciation and the other a "slender" one. Broad consonants are velarized, that is, the back of the tongue is pulled back and slightly up in the direction of the soft palate while the consonant is being articulated. Slender consonants are palatalized, which means the tongue is pushed up toward the hard palate during the articulation. The contrast between broad and slender consonants is crucial in Irish, because the meaning of a word can change if a broad consonant is substituted for a slender consonant or vice versa. For example, the only difference in pronunciation between the words bó ('cow') and beo ('alive') is that bó is pronounced with a broad b sound, while beo is pronounced with a slender b sound. The contrast between broad and slender consonants plays a critical role not only in distinguishing the individual consonants themselves, but also in the pronunciation of the surrounding vowels, in the determination of which consonants can stand next to which other consonants, and in the behavior of words that begin with a vowel. This broad/slender distinction is similar to the hard/soft one of several Slavic languages, like Russian.
The Irish language shares a number of phonological characteristics with its nearest linguistic relatives, Scottish Gaelic and Manx, as well as with Hiberno-English, the language with which it is most closely in contact.
Featured phone
| Voiced alveolar trill | |
|---|---|
| r | |
| IPA number | 122 |
| Encoding | |
| Entity (decimal) | r |
| Unicode (hex) | U+0072 |
| X-SAMPA | r |
| Kirshenbaum | r<trl> |
| Braille |  |
| Sound | |
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The alveolar trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar trills is ⟨r⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is r. It is commonly called the rolled R, rolling R, or trilled R. Quite often, ⟨r⟩ is used in phonemic transcriptions (especially those found in dictionaries) of languages like English and German that have rhotic consonants that are not an alveolar trill. This is partly due to ease of typesetting and partly because ⟨r⟩ is the letter used in the orthographies of these languages.
In the majority of Indo-European languages, this sound is at least occasionally allophonic with an alveolar tap [ɾ], particularly in unstressed positions. Exceptions to this include Albanian, Spanish, Cypriot Greek, and a number of Armenian and Portuguese dialects, which treat them as distinct phonemes.
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From Wikipedia's "Did You Know" archives:
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- ... that quirky dogs and plural wugs helped Jean Berko Gleason (pictured) show that young children extract linguistic rules from what they hear, rather than just memorizing words?
- ... that Georgian ambassador to Israel Lasha Zhvania asked Hebrew speakers to stop calling his country Gruziya?
- ... that electromagnetic articulography tracks movements of the tongue using electromagnetic induction?
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