Phonology Quotes

“Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Just as learning to produce phonologically contoured speech and learning to hear it as such are interrelated aspects of a single task, so, too, learning to creatively project words into new contexts and to grasp the projections of those same words by others into new contexts are two aspects of a single task. What can be hard to see here is that these two pairs of interrelated capacities - to hear and produce potentially significant phonemes, on the one hand, and to detect and to project a pattern of use, on the other - are themselves no less intertwined.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics