More details can be found in standard textbooks. There is a list of references to these at the bottom of the page on Rules and Derivations . 0. Phonology is the study of how the sound systems of a language interact with each other. Thus phonology is the study of how the vowels and consonants interact with each other and how they, in turn, may be affected by elements such as stress. Phonology is divided into two sub-branches.
Segmental phonology deals with the behaviour of vowels and consonants.
Suprasegmental phonology deals with stress, tone and other prosodic phenomena. My particular field is metrical phonology which comes under the aegis of the latter. In the table below, some examples are given of how vowels and consonants can affect each other. Vowel mutation and vowel harmony Vowel mutation was one of the charateristics of the old Germanic languages. The plurals of the nouns foot , mouse , man , and woman are all the result of a process called i-mutation which occurred in prehistoric Old English.