Faroese languageFaroese (ˌfɛəroʊˈiːz,_ˌfær- ; føroyskt mál ˈføːɹɪst ˈmɔaːl) is a North Germanic language spoken as a first language by about 69,000 Faroe Islanders, around 48,000 of whom reside on the Faroe Islands and some 21,000 in other areas, mainly Denmark. It is one of five languages descended from Old West Norse spoken in the Middle Ages, the others being Norwegian, Icelandic, and the extinct Norn and Greenlandic Norse.
DebuccalizationDebuccalization or deoralization is a sound change or alternation in which an oral consonant loses its original place of articulation and moves it to the glottis (usually h, ɦ, or ʔ). The pronunciation of a consonant as [h] is sometimes called aspiration, but in phonetics, aspiration is the burst of air accompanying a stop. The word comes from Latin bucca, meaning "cheek" or "mouth". Debuccalization is usually seen as a subtype of lenition, which is often defined as a sound change involving the weakening of a consonant by progressive shifts in pronunciation.
PreaspirationIn phonetics, preaspiration (sometimes spelled pre-aspiration) is a period of voicelessness or aspiration preceding the closure of a voiceless obstruent, basically equivalent to an [h]-like sound preceding the obstruent. In other words, when an obstruent is preaspirated, the glottis is opened for some time before the obstruent closure. To mark preaspiration using the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic for regular aspiration, h, can be placed before the preaspirated consonant.
Danish phonologyThe phonology of Danish is similar to that of the other closely related Scandinavian languages, Swedish and Norwegian, but it also has distinct features setting it apart. For example, Danish has a suprasegmental feature known as stød which is a kind of laryngeal phonation that is used phonemically. It also exhibits extensive lenition of plosives, which is noticeably more common than in the neighboring languages. Because of these and a few other features, spoken Danish can be challenging for Norwegians and Swedes to understand without training, although they can easily read written Danish.
Complementary distributionIn linguistics, complementary distribution, as distinct from contrastive distribution and free variation, is the relationship between two different elements of the same kind in which one element is found in one set of environments and the other element is found in a non-intersecting (complementary) set of environments. The term often indicates that two superficially-different elements are the same linguistic unit at a deeper level, though more than two elements can be in complementary distribution with one another.
Rough breathingIn the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, the rough breathing (dasỳ pneûma or δασεῖα daseîa; spīritus asper) character is a diacritical mark used to indicate the presence of an h sound before a vowel, diphthong, or after rho. It remained in the polytonic orthography even after the Hellenistic period, when the sound disappeared from the Greek language. In the monotonic orthography of Modern Greek phonology, in use since 1982, it is not used at all. The absence of an /h/ sound is marked by the smooth breathing.
Nasal releaseIn phonetics, a nasal release is the release of a stop consonant into a nasal. Such sounds are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet with superscript nasal letters, for example as [tn] in English catnip [ˈkætnnɪp]. In English words such as sudden in which historically the tongue made separate contacts with the alveolar ridge for the /d/ and /n/, [ˈsʌdən], many speakers today make only one contact. That is, the /d/ is released directly into the /n/: [ˈsʌdnn̩].
Pre-voicingPrevoicing, in phonetics, is voicing before the onset of a consonant or beginning with the onset of the consonant but ending before its release. In the extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology, prevoicing is transcribed with a voicing diacritic ( ̬, U+032C) placed in front of the consonant, as in [ ̬d].
Underlying representationIn some models of phonology as well as morphophonology in the field of linguistics, the underlying representation (UR) or underlying form (UF) of a word or morpheme is the abstract form that a word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phonological rules have been applied to it. In contrast, a surface representation is the phonetic representation of the word or sound. The concept of an underlying representation is central to generative grammar.
