Linguistics

Sounds and their English written forms

I'm writing this to use as reference for a language generator. The following are unusual characters that can be used to represent specific sounds.

Otherwise, everything can be represented more-or-less with standard English letters. Wikipedia has a page with IPA charts for further information.

Components of a Language

Phonology: The sound system of a language

Syntax: The set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, including word order

Morphology: The structure of words and parts of words, including stems, root words, and affixes

Vocabulary: A set of words within a language

Orthography: The written form of language

Definitions

Phoneme: A unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.

Morpheme: The minimal meaningful unit of a language.

Lexeme: A singular concept expressed as a word.

Lexeme vs. word-form

In morphology, lexeme and word-form are two separate but related concepts that define a "word." As an example:

The lexeme eat contains the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate. The lexemes eat and eater are different concepts - one is a verb and the other a noun.

Inflection vs. word formation

Inflectional rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme - e.g., tense changes. Word formation rules relate to new lexemes derived from other lexemes - e.g., dishwasher from dish.