A Glossary of language related terms found on this site
Agglutinative language. A language that builds up words from component morphemes (speech elements) by combining them together.
An example from Hungarian is lakás. This means flat, but when om is added to the end giving lakásom the meaning change to my flat.
Adjective. A describing or qualifying word. E.g 'a big dog' or 'the dog is small'.
Adjectives can either be used attributively or predicatively. When used attributively, an English adjective always comes before the noun. E.g 'a big dog' . When used predicatively, and Englishadjective comes after the noun which is describres with a verb in between. E.g. 'the dog is small.
Diacritic. A sign positioned over or under a letter to indicate it has a different pronunciation (phonetic value) from the same letter lacking the sign.
Digraphs. Two letters combined to represent one sound. E.g. Welsh uses a number of digraphs - ch, dd, ll to represent a single sound.
Diphthongs. Two vowels together.
Finno-Ugric. A subset of languages from the Uralic Language Family including Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian.
Inflection. Inflection is the modification of a word stem (commonly but not always at the end) to change the grammatical function of the word in person, gender, number, tense and so on. One example of inflection from Hungarian is the change of könyv (book) to könyvek (books) in the plural. Another taken from Latin is liber (book) to libri (books) in the plural.
Language Family. A group of languages originating from a common ancestor.
Lenition. A feature in the development of languages which is the weakening, softening or disappearance of a consonant over time. This can be seen in the Latin word 'pater' becoming 'father' with the 'p' being softened to 'f' and the 't' to 'th'.
Lenition comes from the Latin word 'lenis' meaning soft.
Linguistics. The study of language.
Mutation. A change of the initial consonant in the first word (of two) caused by the second. See Welsh Mutation for examples.
Phonology. The branch of linguistics dealing with sound systems in language.
Proto Language. The common (hypothetical and extinct) ancestor from which a Language Family originates. The existence of the Proto Language is inferred through the existence of a group of related languages,
and it can to a degree be reconstructed from these.
Simple Vowels. A single vowel as opposed to a cluster of two or three.
Uralic Language Family. A language family spoken by around twenty million people. The Uralic languages include Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian. The Wiki has a list of the
Uralic Languages.
Ugric. One of the two branches of the Finno-Ugric language family.
Ursprache. This has the same meaning as Proto Language.
