Tuscan dialectTuscan (dialetto toscano djaˈlɛtto tosˈkaːno; di.a-; vernacolo) is a set of Italo-Dalmatian varieties of Romance spoken in Tuscany, Corsica, and Sardinia. Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, specifically on its Florentine dialect, and it became the language of culture throughout Italy due to the prestige of the works by Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini. It would later become the official language of all the Italian states and of the Kingdom of Italy when it was formed.
Consonant voicing and devoicingIn phonology, voicing (or sonorization) is a sound change where a voiceless consonant becomes voiced due to the influence of its phonological environment; shift in the opposite direction is referred to as devoicing or desonorization. Most commonly, the change is a result of sound assimilation with an adjacent sound of opposite voicing, but it can also occur word-finally or in contact with a specific vowel. For example, the English suffix -s is pronounced [s] when it follows a voiceless phoneme (cats), and [z] when it follows a voiced phoneme (dogs).
Tuscan gorgiaThe Tuscan gorgia (gorgia toscana ˈɡɔrdʒa tosˈkaːna, ˈɡɔɾdʒa θosˈkaːna; "Tuscan throat") is a phonetic phenomenon governed by a complex of allophonic rules characteristic of the Tuscan dialects, in Tuscany, Italy, especially the central ones, with Florence traditionally viewed as the center. The gorgia affects the voiceless stops k t̪ and p, which are pronounced as fricative consonants in post-vocalic position (when not blocked by the competing phenomenon of syntactic gemination): /k/ → h /t/ → θ /p/ → ɸ An example: the word identificare ("to identify") /identifiˈkare/ is pronounced by a Tuscan speaker as ˌidentifiˈhaːɾe, not as identifiˈkaːre, as standard Italian phonology would require.
Homorganic consonantIn phonetics, a homorganic consonant (from homo- "same" and organ "(speech) organ") is a consonant sound that is articulated in the same place of articulation as another. For example, p, b and m are homorganic consonants of one another since they share the bilabial place of articulation. Consonants that are not articulated in the same place are called heterorganic. Descriptive phonetic classification relies on the relationships between a number of technical terms that describe the way sounds are made; and one of the relevant elements involves that place at which a specific sound is formed and voiced.
AssibilationIn linguistics, assibilation is a sound change resulting in a sibilant consonant. It is a form of spirantization and is commonly the final phase of palatalization. A characteristic of Mashreqi varieties of Arabic (particularly Levantine and Egyptian) is to assibilate the interdental consonants of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in certain contexts (defined more culturally than phonotactically).
Chain shiftIn historical linguistics, a chain shift is a set of sound changes in which the change in pronunciation of one speech sound (typically, a phoneme) is linked to, and presumably causes, a change in pronunciation of other sounds as well. The sounds involved in a chain shift can be ordered into a "chain" in such a way that after the change is complete, each phoneme ends up sounding like what the phoneme before it in the chain sounded like before the change.
FlappingFlapping or tapping, also known as alveolar flapping, intervocalic flapping, or t-voicing, is a phonological process found in many varieties of English, especially North American, Cardiff, Ulster, Australian and New Zealand English, whereby the voiceless alveolar stop consonant phoneme t is pronounced as a voiced alveolar flap [ɾ], a sound produced by briefly tapping the alveolar ridge with the tongue, when placed between vowels. In London English, the flapped ɾ is perceived as a casual pronunciation intermediate between the "posh" affricate ts and the "rough" glottal stop ʔ.
Florentine dialectThe Florentine dialect or vernacular (dialetto fiorentino or vernacolo fiorentino) is a variety of Tuscan, a Romance language spoken in the Italian city of Florence and its immediate surroundings. A received pedagogical variant derived from it historically, once called la pronuncia fiorentina emendata (literally, 'the amended Florentine pronunciation'), was officially prescribed as the national language of the Kingdom of Italy, when it was established in 1861.
Contraction (grammar)A contraction is a shortened version of the spoken and written forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds. In linguistic analysis, contractions should not be confused with crasis, abbreviations and initialisms (including acronyms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in layman’s terms. Contraction is also distinguished from morphological clipping, where beginnings and endings are omitted.
Irish initial mutationsIrish, like all modern Celtic languages, is characterized by its initial consonant mutations. These mutations affect the initial consonant of a word under specific morphological and syntactic conditions. The mutations are an important tool in understanding the relationship between two words and can differentiate various meanings. Irish, like Manx and colloquial Scottish Gaelic, uses two mutations on consonants: lenition (séimhiú ˈʃeː.vjuː) and eclipsis (urú ˈʊ.
