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O

Oblique case

Oblique cases are all morphological cases apart from the most basic ones (e.g. all but the nominative and accusative).


Obstruent

A non-sonorant consonant like fricatives and stops (including implosives, ejective stops, clicks, fricatives, ejective fricatives, affricates, ejective affricates, affricated clicks). All obstruents have a major constriction of the airflow in the oral tract.


Octave

A doubling of the fundamental frequency.


Offset

Coda, especially word coda.


Onset

The part of the syllable preceding the vowel, e.g. in the syllable /pak/, the consonant /p/ forms the onset.


Open

A lower variant of a vowel, as in open-mid [ε] as opposed to close-mid [e]. Contrast close.


Open syllable

A syllable without a consonant at the end, like the first syllables in English beehive, bylaw, sawing. Contrast closed syllable.


Open-mid

See mid.


Optative

In mood systems, the mood that is used to express a desire or wish for some event to occur.


Optimality Theory

Optimality Theory argues that inputs (underlying forms) and outputs (phonetic forms) are related through a mechanism that evaluates how well different possible outputs (called candidates) satisfy the constraint hierarchy of a language.



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