• Some basic Linguistic Terminology
• a word is phonologically (i.e. sound-wise) composed of phonemes (i.e. sounds)
  
• A phoneme is the smallest sound that is capable of carrying meaning (i.e. it is one of the small number of sounds that native speakers of a given language count as the sounds of that language).
• Note that we are talking about capacity to carry meaning, not actually carrying meaning
• What's the difference?
• The sound at the beginning of "cat," which I'll represent at /k/ is a phoneme, but that sound all by itself has no meaning.
  
• But it is capable of carrying meaning. How do we know/decide that?
• look at 'rat' and 'cat': the only difference is one phoneme, one sound, and that 'carries the meaning'
• we could use 'rat' and 'rack' to find another phoneme.
• There are roughly 52 phonemes in English.
  
• The Arabic sound represented by the letter ayn ع is incapable of carrying meaning in English. Not only does it have no meaning by itself in English, but it occurs in no English words, so it does not actually carry meaning in any English word.
• Note that a phoneme in one language may not be a phoneme in another.
• Note that many phonemes have allophones:
• Put your hand right up in front of your mouth and pronounce 'pit' and 'tip': you should feel a very different puff of air with the two /p/ sounds: those are 'allophones.' Another instance might be the -ed sound in 'fished' versus 'raged': put your hand on your throat as you pronounce them: you should feel vibration only on the /i/ of 'fished,' whereas the vibration should continue throughout the pronunciation of 'raged.'
  
• a word is semantically composed of one or more morphemes.
  
• A morpheme is the smallest carrier of meaning.
• A morpheme may be a root or an affix (prefixes, suffixes, or infixes are all affixes)
  
• Root morphemes are mostly free morphemes: they occur as independent words
  
• Affixes are bound morphemes: they do not occur as independent words (except very occasionally due to clipping: retro or dis, for example)
  
• There are also bound root morphemes: roots that do not occur as independent words and yet are not affixes
• These usually come from Greek or Latin in English: they are the stems we are learning in this class, such as alg(e)- or chrom-.
• Some phonemic terms:
• look at the table in the Wikipedia article on English Phonology
  
• the place and manner of articulation are used to identify phonemes: some of the most important terms are:
  
• labial means you use your lips to make the sound: /m/ /b/ /p/
• dental means you use your teeth to make the sound: 'th' in 'thing' and 'the'
  
• alveolar means you engage the alveolar ridge just behind your upper teeth: /t/ /d/ /s/ /z/ /r/
  
• palatal means you use your palate: /j/
• velar means you engage your velum: /ng/ /k/ /g/ /kh/
  
• labio velar means you make a velar sound while rounding your lips: /kw/ /gw/
• glottal is at the far back of your mouth: /h/
• there are other sounds in other languages and also some others in English, but this is enough for us.
  
• voiced (called 'lenis' on wikipedia) means that your vocal cords are vibrating when you make that sound: all vowels are voiced, and so are /g,/ /b/ /r/ and others.
• unvoiced (called 'fortis' on wikipedia) means that your vocal cords are not vibrating.
  
• stops are when you stop the air flow to make the sound: /k/ /g/ /p/ /t/
• fricative means that there is rubbing, a sort of partial stopping of air
• labio-dental fricatives, for example: /v/ /f/
• 
  
• so there are voiced dental stops, unvoiced dental stops, voiced labials, etc.: each phoneme has a precise set of adjectives from the list above (and a few more sometimes) that identify it.

Next stop: Rask's law, which is mostly known as Grimm's law: but Rasmus Rask was the first to discover it, for those who care about 'firsts.'