Estonian phonology

What are the phonemes of Estonian?

Estonian has nine vowel phonemes, represented by the letters i ü u e ö õ o ä a, which are pronounced as [i y u e ø ɤ o æ ɑ]. They are divided according to tongue height as: high [i y u], mid [e ø ɤ o], and low vowels [æ ɑ].

Is Estonian a phonetic language?

Another plus is that Estonian is a highly phonetic language, i.e. each letter has one sound and is generally sounded consistently.

What is palatalization in Estonian?

Palatalization in Estonian is regressive, which means that the word final /i/ affected the place of articulation of previous alveolar consonant or all alveolar consonants in a cluster.

Is Estonian Agglutinative?

From the typological point of view, Estonian is a predominantly agglutinative language. The loss of word-final sounds is extensive, and this has made its inflectional morphology markedly more fusional, especially with respect to noun and adjective inflection.

What are the 44 phonemes?

In English, there are 44 phonemes, or word sounds that make up the language. They're divided into 19 consonants, 7 digraphs, 5 'r-controlled' sounds, 5 long vowels, 5 short vowels, 2 'oo' sounds, 2 diphthongs.

Is Russian fully phonetic?

Russian is a phonetic language, which means you can accurately tell from the spelling of a word how it should be pronounced, and you can accurately tell from the pronunciation how to spell it. This is a sensible system that English completely abandons.

Is Estonian similar to Russian?

The official language of Estonia is Estonian, a Uralic language of the Finnic branch, which is related to Finnish. It is unrelated to the bordering Russian and Latvian languages, both of which are Indo-European (more specifically East Slavic and Baltic, respectively).

Do most Estonians speak Russian?

While 10 years ago the most widely spoken foreign language in Estonia was Russian, today it is English. Estonian is spoken by 84% of the population: 67% speak it as a mother tongue and 17% as a foreign language.

Is Ʒ an oral sound?

The/ʒ/ phoneme is made through the mouth and it is Voiced which means that you vibrate your vocal chords to make the sound.

Is ɑɪ a diphthong?

/ɑɪ/ is a diphthong, which is a combination of two different vowel sounds. To begin, place your tongue low in your mouth, and shifted toward the back, to say /ɑ/. Then, as you vibrate your vocal cords, lift your tongue high in the mouth and shift it forward, to say /ɪ/.

Why is ə called schwa?

Why is it called schwa? One of the earliest known instances of the word schwa in English came in 1895 from German. It came into German from the Hebrew shewa, which literally means “emptiness.” The same word in Hebrew also refers to a mark added to a letter—a diacritic—to note an /ə/-like vowel or no vowel at all.

Why is Estonian hard to learn?

It has 14 noun cases along with short and long consonants and vowels, which explains why it has been named the world's 5th toughest language to learn for English speakers after Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Arabic. Estonian has no gender or future tense.

Is Russian agglutinative?

Russian is rather a synthetic language, not analytic, and being a synthetic language it is flective, not agglutinative, which means that it uses a lot of prefixes, suffixes and flections and it can express in one word what analytic language like English has to use three words for; but unlike agglutinative languages, ...

Is Russian a fusional language?

The most important thing that learners have to understand is that Russian is a fusional language. This means that suffixes and prefixes are attached to roots of words to change the grammar or meaning.

What are the 24 phonemes?

English has 24 consonant sounds. Some consonants have voice from the voicebox and some don't. These consonants are voiced and voiceless pairs /p/ /b/, /t/ /d/, /k/ /g/, /f/ /v/, /s/ /z/, /θ/ /ð/, /ʃ/ /ʒ/, /ʈʃ/ /dʒ/. These consonants are voiced /h/, /w/, /n/, /m/, /r/, /j/, /ŋ/, /l/.

What are the consonants in Estonian?

Estonian vowels and consonants

Vowels: A, E, I, O, U, Õ, Ä, Ö, Ü Consonants: B, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, R, S, Z, Ž, T, V.

What words have the ɒ sound?

Some Ways of Spelling the /ɒ/ Sound

o, as in: log, option, odd, shock, knob, off, God, sod, rod, don, pot, cot, etc. a, as in: watch, yacht, waddle, was, want, etc. ou, as in: cough, trough, etc.

What is a 4 letter phoneme called?

Quadgraph – A quadgraph is a four-letter grapheme that represents one phoneme/sound. For example, the 'eigh' representing the /ay/ sound in the word eight is a quadgraph.

What sound is ʒ?

The sound /ʒ/ is a voiced, alveo-palatal, fricative consonant. Lightly press the middle of your tongue between your alveolar ridge and your soft palate. The sides of your tongue should lightly touch your back upper teeth.

Is Estonian SVO?

Typologically, Estonian is usually classed as a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language (de Sivers 1969: 351–352; Tael 1988; Vilkuna 1998; Dryer 2013a; Lindström 2017: 547).

What are the 5 types of consonants?

In English there are approximately 24 consonants and these are arranged into five main groups: (1) plosives, (2) nasals, (3) fricatives, (4) affricates, and (5) approximants.