Phonemic Inventories Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Phonemic Inventories - Assignment Example On the other hand, consonants are speech sounds produced with significant restriction of airflow via the vocal tract (Bischoff & Fountain, 2014). Combination of vowels and consonants form syllables in the languages of the world as indicated in the IPA. Moreover, the authors define phonemic inventory as the assessment of the size of the phonemes or distinctive sounds in a language and their articulation. Minimal pairs are sets of phrases or words which differ in only a single element such as chroneme, toneme, or phoneme, and have divergent meanings in a language and are used to exemplify that two phones can constitute two distinct phonemes in a particular language. Bengali is spoken in eastern India and Bangladesh. As a language used by a good proportion of people, the language contains various speech sounds, stress, articulation and its study will therefore improve my understanding of phonetics and phonology while comprehending how geography affects formulation and articulation of speech sounds. In the consonant inventory in Bengali, fricatives and plosives differ in articulation and aspiration (Anderson,  1917). The voicing of the postalveolars contrasts by consonant nature as illustrated in the consonant inventory below; Evidently, the consonant inventory of Bengali differs from the one presented in the IPA journal in that it does not have germinates and that differentiate the postalveolar sound (Khan,  2010). Moreover, velar, lateral approximant and glottal consonants are lacking. The approximant in the IPA journal is and j in the Bengali inventory (Milles, 2012). However, they are similar since both contain the basic plosives, fricatives, nasal and approximant. With 12 consonants, Bengali joins the 15.80% (of 563) of languages considered to be of small consonant inventory a category that involves 83 languages whose consonant size is between 6 and 14 (Ian, 2013). Bengali differentiates vowels based on