Germanic

2009-04-13T21:12:11Z

Norm mit: Spelling ("thee"->"the")

{{InfoboxFamily|
|Family=Germanic
|Highest=[[Indo-European]]
|Genus=[[Germanic]]
|MPIExt1=GERMIC
}}

===Name===
The term '''Germanic''' was derived from ''German'' using the family suffix [[-ic]].

An alternative name is
*[[Teutonic]]

===Composition===
*[[North Germanic]]
*[[West Germanic]]
*[[East Germanic]]

===Validity of grouping===
The validity of Germanic has been well established on phonological, morphological and lexical grounds at least since Grimm 1819, which was one of the earliest comprehensive historical-comparative accounts of a language family.

===Classification===
*[[Indo-European]]

===Validity of classification===
The Indo-European affiliation of Germanic has been well established since Bopp 1818, which established the Indo-European family. It has never been in doubt.

===Link===
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages Germanic languages in English Wikipedia]

===References===
*Bopp 1818...
*Grimm, Jacob. 1819. ''Deutsche Grammatik.''

[[Category:En]]
[[category:language family]]

Sonority hierarchy

2009-04-13T21:10:13Z

Norm mit: Parenthesize the cited author; quote articles & italicize titles

The '''Sonority hierarchy''' is a hierarchy representing the [[sonority]] of classes of sounds.

Speech sounds are typically ranked according to their [[manner of articulation]]. Accordingly, in all sonority hierarchies, [[vowel]]s are at the top of the hierarchy, [[consonant]]s at the bottom. Most hierarchies are more finely graded:

''greatest sonority'' > ''least sonority''
vowels > [[sonorant]] consonants > [[obstruent]]s (Zec 1995),
or
vowels > glides > liquids > nasals > [[obstruent]]s (Clements 1990)
or
[[vowel]]s > [[glide]]s > [[nasal]]s > [[voiced]] obstruents > [[voiceless]] obstruents (Katamba 1989)
or
vowels > liquids > nasals > voiced fricatives > voiceless fricatives = voiced plosives > voiceless plosives (Anderson & Ewen 1987)

Some hierarchies assign each individual sound to a rank of its own, thus ranking sounds also according to their [[place of articulation]] (Ladefoged 1993).

The sonority hierarchy can be used, to explain distributions of segments in syllables. The [[nucleus]] (i.e. vowel) of a syllable is the most sonorous element. The sonority of the surrounding consonants must decrease to the left and to the right starting from the vowel. Put differently: the more sonorous a segment, the closer to the nucleus of the syllable.

=== Example ===

in English the syllables ''matl'', ''lkon'' are impossible since in ''matl'' the sonority in the sequence ''tl'' increases (must be: decreasing) and in ''lkon'' the sonority of the sequence ''lk'' decreases (must be increasing).

=== Links ===

[http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Sonority+hierarchy&lemmacode=238 Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics]

===References===

* Anderson, John M. and Colin J. Ewen (1987) ''Principles of Dependency Phonology'', Cambridge: CUP.
* Clements, George N. (1990) "The role of the sonority cycle in core syllabification". In ''Papers in Laboratory Phonology I: Between the Grammar and Physics of Speech'', John Kingston, and Mary E. Beckman (eds.), 283-333. CUP.
* Katamba, F. 1989. ''An Introduction to Phonology'', Longmans, London.
* Ladefoged, Peter (1993) ''A Course in Phonetics (3rd ed.)'', New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
* Selkirk, E.O. 1980. "The Role of Prosodic Categories in English Word Stress", ''Linguistic Inquiry'' 11, pp. 563-605
* Zec, Draga (1995) "Sonority constraints on syllable structure", ''Phonology'' 12: 85-129.

===Other languages===
German [[Sonoritätshierarchie]]

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[[Category:Phonetics and phonology]]
[[Category:Phonology]]

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Germanic

Sonority hierarchy