Mohamed. A Mohammed. I Abasiono. M Adrian. N Tariq. Y

Table of Contents  Quick Definition  A Deeper Understanding  Real Life Implications  Morphemes People!  An Even Deeper Understanding  Important Hints

Quick Definition Phonology is the study of sounds The smallest unit of sound that can be altered to change the meaning of a word is called a phoneme. In English for example, the words win, pin, kin, and sin all have different meanings due to the fact of the phoneme or initial sound is different.

A Deeper Understanding Different languages may use somewhat different sets of phonemes. For instance, English use phonemes and often combine consonants into clusters. This can be heard in American English words such as schedule, months, and shrill.

Real Life Implications The san languages of southwest Africa (which are spoken by the Ju/’hoansi and other ethnicities) use some sounds that are not found not only in the English language, but most other languages around the world. The sounds they use are like clicks which serve as consonants, and the Ju/’hoansi language has distinct kinds of clicks that are produced pulling the tongue away from different locations in the mouth.

Morphemes People! Morphemes are meaningful morphological units of a language that cannot be further divided. For example, in, come, -ing, forming incoming. Morphemes may be classified, on the basis of word formation, characteristics into the following types: Root – Simple, and made up of a single morpheme. Stem – Complex and made up of one or more morphemes. Affix – Simple and bound while also including examples like suffix, infix, prefix, and etc. Clitic – Bound phonologically and free syntactically.

An Even Deeper Understanding If your language does not have some of the sounds of another language, it is usually difficult for you to hear the differences and to pronounce them correctly. For this reason, the R and L sounds in English are difficult to distinguish for native Japanese speakers, as the sounds are very similar. Native English speakers rarely have trouble in distinguishing the R and L sounds because they have been familiar with them from early childhood. However, English speakers have difficulty with unfamiliar sounds in other languages, such as the Ju/’hoansi clicks mentioned above.

Important Hints Learning and using the sounds of a language can be significantly complicated by the writing system. English has more than 1100 combinations of letters that are used to produce the 40 commonly used sounds of the spoken language.  It becomes a problem when words share the same phoneme but spell it differently. This occurs with the “e” sounds in me, tea, tree, key, and country. In addition, many English words have the same letter combination but are not pronounced the same. This is the case with the words clove and love, as well as cough and bough. Their endings are spelt the same way, but they sound differently.

The End  Thank you.