Nuts and Bolts: suprasegmentals.

 The first question with suprasegmentals is: what on earth is a segment when you're talking about language?

That's easy. A segment is a vowel or consonant. Those are both single speech sounds that are the same from beginning to end. They're almost always very short.

Something suprasegmental is something which carries on over more than one segment. The study of suprasegmentals can cover all sorts of stuff, from the way the word mob takes longer to say than the mob at the beginning of the word mobster, to the way people speak higher and softer when speaking to babies.

Suprasegmentals can involve pitch and tone and volume, and questions and exclamations. They help us distinguish between night rate and nitrate. They are the difference between the degree of warmth of welcome embedded in the hundred different ways of saying hello.

Today is a day to admire your own command of suprasegmentals - and to marvel at the way that so many of them work in every language on Earth.

Thing To Notice Today: suprasegmentals. Suprā- is basically Latin and means above; segmentum is also Latin, and comes from secāre, to cut.