Editing Phonology (section)

== Terminology ==
The word "phonology" (as in "[[phonology of English]]") can refer either to the field of study or to the phonological system of a given language.<ref>{{cite web |title=Definition of PHONOLOGY |url=https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phonology |website=www.merriam-webster.com |access-date=3 January 2022 |language=en}}</ref> This is one of the fundamental systems that a language is considered to comprise, like its [[syntax]], its [[morphology (linguistics)|morphology]] and its [[vocabulary|lexicon]]. The word ''phonology'' comes from [[Ancient Greek]] {{lang|grc|φωνή}}, ''phōnḗ'', 'voice, sound', and the suffix ''[[-logy]]'' (which is from Greek {{lang|grc|λόγος}}, ''lógos'', 'word, speech, subject of discussion').

Phonology is typically distinguished from [[phonetics]], which concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and [[perception]] of the sounds or signs of language.<ref name=Lass1998/><ref name=Carr2003/> Phonology describes the way they function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. For many linguists, phonetics belongs to [[descriptive linguistics]] and phonology to [[theoretical linguistics]], but establishing the phonological system of a language is necessarily an application of theoretical principles to analysis of phonetic evidence in some theories. The distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of the [[phoneme]] in the mid-20th century. Some subfields of modern phonology have a crossover with phonetics in descriptive disciplines such as [[psycholinguistics]] and [[speech perception]], which result in specific areas like [[articulatory phonology]] or [[laboratory phonology]].

Definitions of the field of phonology vary. [[Nikolai Trubetzkoy]] in ''Grundzüge der Phonologie'' (1939) defines phonology as "the study of sound pertaining to the system of language," as opposed to phonetics, which is "the study of sound pertaining to the act of speech" (the distinction between ''language'' and ''speech'' being basically [[Ferdinand de Saussure]]'s distinction between [[langue and parole|''langue'' and ''parole'']]).<ref name="GdP">Trubetzkoy N., ''Grundzüge der Phonologie'' (published 1939), translated by C. Baltaxe as ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=Ej6ENdUGS-UC&q=%22Grundz%C3%BCge+der+Phonologie%22 Principles of Phonology]'', University of California Press, 1969</ref> More recently, Lass (1998) writes that phonology refers broadly to the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language, and in more narrow terms, "phonology proper is concerned with the function, behavior and organization of sounds as linguistic items."<ref name=Lass1998/> According to Clark ''et al.'' (2007), it means the systematic use of [[sound]] to encode meaning in any spoken [[human language]], or the field of linguistics studying that use.<ref name=ClarkEtal2007/>