10 Results found for " Appendix:Words_that_comprise_a_single_sound"

Appendix:Words that comprise a single sound

Languages may or may not allow words that consist of a single phoneme. Of those that do, these are generally vowels that serve as function words (grammar words, like prepositions and pronouns), such as English a and I; interjections, such as English ah! and sh!; or onomatopoeia, such as zzz… for sleeping. However, there are a smaller number of cases of content words that also consist of a single vowel sound. These are especially common in monosyllabic tonal languages such as those of East Asia. Words that consist of a single consonant sound are rarer. This is a list of content words in various languages that comprise a single sound, in the sense that they can be written with a single letter of the International Phonetic Alphabet not counting diacritics, and that stand on their own. Only national or official languages with more than ten million speakers are included. Notes: Function words, interjections and onomatopoeia, dialects, proper names, and words which cannot stand on their own (like French a (“[s/he] has”)) are excluded from the list. With such words, contrived vowel-only sentences can be made, such as dialectal Danish A æ ue å æ ø i æ å (“I am out on the island in the river”). The entries roughly follow the alphabetical order of the IPA letters, based on graphic similarity.