Contrastive

All the clusters are shown in the following table, phonetically, i.e. superscript ʰ can mark either contrastive or non-contrastive aspiration (see above).

Analyzing sounds in terms of contrastive features also opens up comparative scope—it makes clear, for instance, that the difficulty Japanese speakers have differentiating /r/ and /l/ in English is because these sounds are not contrastive in Japanese.

An example of this relative spread can be seen in trying to explain why contrastive voicing commonly occurs with plosives, such as in English with “neat” and “need”, but much fewer have this occur in fricatives, such as the English “niece” and “knees”.

An IPA chart of all contrastive sounds in Marathi is provided below.

Apparently this was caused by word pairs such as noutaa : nouti ('bring') and nousta : nousi ('rise'), which were felt important enough to keep them contrastive.

A typical Niger–Congo tone system involves two or three contrastive level tones.

By this point a tone split had happened in the language, leading to six tones but a loss of contrastive voicing among consonants.

Elements of laryngeal articulation or phonation may occur widely in the world's languages as phonetic detail even when not phonemically contrastive.

Every distinction is supposed to be contrastive by the Nostraticists who reconstruct them.

For example, Shanghainese has two contrastive tones no matter how many syllables are in a word.

For this reason, his treatments of Greek and Hebrew grammar are not isolated works on their topic but contrastive grammars treating the aspects which influenced Latin or which were required for properly understanding Latin texts.

In the description of some languages, the term chroneme has been used to indicate contrastive length or duration of phonemes.

It is now widely held that Old Chinese did not have phonemically contrastive tone.

Phonological property A number of languages use breathy voicing in a phonologically contrastive way.

The contrastive word for a village as a smaller settlement is dorp.

The nasals are therefore not contrastive in these environments, and according to some theorists this makes it inappropriate to assign the nasal phones heard here to any one of the phonemes (even though, in this case, the phonetic evidence is unambiguous).

The parameter of vowel height appears to be the primary cross-linguistic feature of vowels in that all spoken language s use height as a contrastive feature.

These instances are contrastive, so red wine is so called only in comparison with the other kind of wine (which also is not white for the same reasons).

This does not necessarily mean that one of the phonemes is absent in the homonym accent; merely that it is not contrastive in the same range of contexts.

This in turn suggests that some sound changes must have operated on particular dentals, but not others, prior to the general loss of contrastive voicing and aspiration.