Glossary

Phoneme

The smallest meaningful sound (not letter) in a language, as determined by the speaker. See on Wikipedia.

Segment

A discrete speech sound or part of a speech sound, which is discernable by a speaker, but is not necessarily meaningful by itself. See on Wikipedia.

IPA

The International Phonetic Alphabet, which is widely used for notation of speech sounds in linguistic research and language description. See on Wikipedia.

Tone

The relative pitch of a speaker's voice as they pronounce the various words of a language. In languages that attend to tone, is just as important to the meaning of a word or grammatical structure as the letters of the word. See on Wikipedia.

Sesquisyllable

Coming from the latin root meaning "1.5", a sesquisyllable is a type of syllable which includes a minor syllable that is often reduced in some way, and is not traditionally seen as a syllable in its own right. See on Wikipedia.

Reduplication

The repetition of either a whole word, or part of a word to create a new sense of the word, or to convey grammatical meaning. This concept is discussed in further detail on the Reduplicative Constructions page. See on Wikipedia.

Grapheme

The smallest part of a writing system that is recognizable by a reader as being meaningful. It is represented in linguistics documents with angle brackets ⟨...⟩. See on Wikipedia.

*

When an asterisk is placed before an example, it is the standard way of showing that the following example is incorrect. See on Wikipedia.