äänteistön

Äänteistöön refers to the inventory of sounds (phonemes) that exist in a particular language. It is a fundamental concept in linguistics and phonetics. Each language has its own unique äänteistöön, meaning that the sounds that are distinctive in one language may not be in another. For instance, the difference between the "p" and "b" sounds is phonemic in English, meaning it can change the meaning of a word (e.g., "pat" vs. "bat"). However, in some other languages, these sounds might be allophones of the same phoneme, meaning they are variations of a sound that do not change the meaning of a word.

The study of äänteistöön involves identifying and classifying these distinctive sounds. Linguists use phonetic descriptions to characterize sounds based on features such as place and manner of articulation, voicing, and vowel height and backness. The collection of all such distinctive sounds for a language is its äänteistöön. Understanding a language's äänteistöön is crucial for learning its pronunciation, for analyzing its structure, and for comparing it to other languages. It forms the building blocks upon which all spoken words are constructed.