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Linguistics Terminology

If you’ve stumbled on my blog, and don’t know much about linguistics, some of the terminology I throw around might be a bit confusing. While I attempt to explain most of what I’m doing in my constructed language posts, there are some terms that I use frequently enough that they deserve their own page. As such, this is a sort of glossary.

Phonology: The various sounds that make up a language, and/or the study of those sounds.

IPA: Not a beer. The International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of symbols linguists use to precisely transcribe sounds. If you see a symbol you don’t recognize, check its pronunciation here. (Or, if it’s a vowel, here.)

Places and Manners of Articulation: IPA consonant charts are

Voiced/voiceless: Voiced sounds are sounds where the vocal chords are vibrating, like d, m, and a. Voiceless sounds are where they aren’t, like t, s, and k. Rule of thumb: if you can sing a pitch with it, it’s voiced.

Orthography: The way a language is written.

Romanization: The way a language is transcribed using the Latin alphabet - the alphabet we write English in!

Morphology: The study of the way roots, prefixes and suffixes (and occasionally other stuff) combine to form complete words.

Morpheme: The smallest unit of meaning. Can be a root (like English make), or an affix (like English making or unmake.)

Inflectional Morphology: Things you can add to words to add meaning. Like the English affixes -ed or -ing.

Derivational Morphology: Things you can add to roots to create new words. Like the English affixes un- or -able.

Grammatical Case: Markers (often affixes) that you can add to nouns to specify their role in a sentence.

Aspect: Verb tense marks actual time, aspect marks relative time. “I went” is in the past tense, but “I had gone” is in the past tense and the perfect aspect. “I am going” is in the continuous aspect. Some languages make finer distinctions, like specific aspects for “I start to go” (inchoative) or “I often go” (habitual).

Mood: Moods are