Phonology

Prospectus of a new work, entitled Pantographia: Containing accurate copies of all the known alphabets in the world. Together with an English explanation of the peculiar force of each letter: To which will be added specimens of all well-authenticated oral languages, Forming a comprehensive Digest of phonology.

The advantages of such a system [of a universal alphabet], both scientific and practical, were urged, the former in connection with the study of ethnology and philology, and the latter chiefly in connection with the great Protestant missionary enterprises of the present time. Professor [Karl Richard] Lepsius and Dr. Max Müller have devoted much time to the subject, founding their phonology on the physiological principles ably expounded by Dr. Johannes Müller, and published in the Transactions of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin.

The Achean, the ancient Malayu and other mixed phonologies possessing a considerable degree of harshness, were thus formed.

The most interesting applications of the phonograph, however, are to the analysis of speech. […] [T]he point in which the proposed arrangements will be of most value is in the analysis of the inflections of speech, or the rapid variations of pitch which occur continually. This analysis is of the highest importance for phonology, as the inflections are undoubtedly among the principal characteristics of dialects.

Crucially, the neat separateness of phonologies which my account seems to imply is an abstraction and does not mean that the phonologies represented different regional or social dialects.

Thus, underlying 'agtus' was converted first into 'āgtus' by the vowel lengthening rule, and then into 'āktus' by the ancient persistent rule. This example has previously been interpreted as indicating that new rules can enter a phonology elsewhere than at depth I.

Sign language linguists have produced many volumes of description of the phonology and morphology of signs and the syntax of sign languages.

The term ‘phonology’ may seem odd in the context of sign linguistics, since the word has as its root phon – the Greek word for ‘sound’. […] However, sign linguists now prefer the term phonology to emphasise that the same level of structure exists in sign language and spoken language, despite the differences in modality. The study of sign phonology began with the work of William Stokoe, the American founder of sign linguistics.