Phoneme

In oral language, a phoneme is the theoretical basic unit of sound that can be used to distinguish words or morphemes; in sign language, it is a similarly basic unit of hand shape, motion, position, or facial expression. (Formerly termed chereme.) That is, changing a phoneme in a word produces either nonsense, or a different word with a different meaning.

Background and related ideas

The phoneme is a structuralist abstraction that was introduced by the Polish-Russian linguist Jan Niecislaw Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929) and elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoi (1890-1938). It was later adapted to and formally psychologized in generative linguistics (after Chomsky and Halle). Rather than a basic mental unit of language, however, it may well be a perceptual artifact of alphabetic literacy (see the terms Phonemic awareness and Phonological awareness). If not that, it may be an epiphenomenal aspect to listening removed from face-to-face encounters, that is, text-like listening (qv phone and feature). It could be said that the unit of the phoneme is a necessary construct if we wish to set a dynamic, complex spoken language into static, written form expressed at a sub-syllabic level, though the model is a simplification and no where near phonologically or phonetically complete.

Related Topics:
Structuralist - Abstraction - Baudouin de Courtenay - Nikolai Trubetzkoi - Generative linguistics - Chomsky - Halle - Phonemic awareness - Phonological awareness - Epiphenomenal - Phone - Feature

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Variant phones that are not recognized as distinct by a speaker, and which are not meaningfully different in the language, are known as allophones of a phoneme. For example, the English words "pat" and "sat" differ only in their initial consonants. This difference known as contrastiveness is sufficient to distinguish words, and therefore the P and S sounds are said to be different phonemes. A pair of words that are identical except for such a sound are known as a minimal pair; this is the most frequent demonstration that two sounds are phonemes. If no minimal pair can be found to demonstrate that two sounds are distinct, it may be that they are allophones. This is especially likely if they consistently occur in different environments. For example, the "dark" L sound at the end of the English word "wool" is quite different from the "light" L sound at the beginning of the word "leaf", but this difference is meaningless in English, and is determined by whether the sound is at the beginning or end of a word. A native English speaker might have a hard time hearing the difference at first, but in Turkish the difference between "light" and "dark" L is sufficient to distinguish words. That is, they are two separate phonemes in Turkish, but allophones of a single phoneme in English.

Related Topics:
Allophone - Minimal pair - Turkish

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The phonemic relationship of two sounds may not be obvious to a non-native speaker, which is why minimal pairs and an understanding of phonetic environments are important. For example, in Japanese, there is a phoneme /t/ that sounds rather like an English T before the vowel /a/, but more like a CH before the vowel /i/. Likewise, in Korean there is a phoneme /r/ that sounds like an English N at the begining of a word, like a flapped R between vowels, and like an L at the end of a word. These sound very different to an English speaker, who is attuned to hearing them because the differences are meaningful in English. However, the native speaker has learned from an early age to filter out the difference, as they are not meaningful in their language. In Korean, for instance, it is impossible to distinguish the two words "ram" and "lam", despite the fact that both R and L sounds occur in the language.

Related Topics:
Japanese - Korean - Flapped

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The exact number of phonemes in English depends on the speaker and the method of determining phoneme vs. allophone, but estimates typically range from 40 to 45, which is above average across all languages. Pirahã has only 10, while !Xóõ has 141.

Related Topics:
English - Pirahã - !Xóõ

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Depending on the language and the alphabet used, a phoneme may be written consistently with one letter; however there are many exceptions to this rule — see Writing systems below.

Related Topics:
Alphabet - Writing systems

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Some languages make use of pitch for the precise same purpose. In this case, the tones used are called tonemes. Some languages distinguish words made up of the same phonemes (and tonemes) by using different durations of some elements, which are called chronemes. The equivalents of phonemes in sign languages are called cheremes.

Related Topics:
Pitch - Toneme - Chroneme - Chereme

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Notation

A transcription that only indicates the different phonemes of a languages is said to be phonemic. Such transcriptions are enclosed within virgules (slashes), / /; these show that each enclosed symbol is claimed to be phonemically meaningful. On the other hand, a transcription that indicates finer detail, including allophonic variation like the two English L's, is said to be phonetic, and is enclosed in square brackets, .

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The common notation used in linguistics employs virgules (slashes) (/ /) around the symbol that stands for the phoneme. For example, the phoneme for the initial consonant sound in the word "phoneme" would be written as {{IPA|/f/}}. In other words, the graphemes are <ph>, but this digraph represents one sound {{IPA|/f/}}. Allophones, real speech variants of a phoneme, are often denoted in linguistics by the use of diacritical or other marks added to the phoneme symbols and then placed in square brackets () to differentiate them from the phoneme in slant brackets (/ /). The conventions of orthography are then kept separate from both phonemes and allophones by the use of the markers < > to enclose the spelling.

Related Topics:
Grapheme - Allophone - Orthography

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The symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and extended sets adapted to a particular language are often used by linguists to write phonemes, with the principle being one symbol equals one categorical sound. Due to problems displaying some symbols in the early days of the Internet, systems such as X-SAMPA and Kirshenbaum were developed to represent IPA symbols in plain text. As of 2004, any modern web browser can display IPA symbols (as long as the operating system provides the appropriate fonts), and we use this system in this article.

Related Topics:
International Phonetic Alphabet - X-SAMPA - Kirshenbaum - 2004 - Web browser - Operating system

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Examples

Examples of phonemes in the English language would include sounds from the set of English consonants, like {{IPA|/p/}} and {{IPA|/b/}}. These two are most often written consistently with one letter for each sound. However, phonemes might not be so apparent in written English, such as when they are typically represented with combined letters, called digraphs, like <sh> (pronounced {{IPA|/ʃ/}}) or <ch> (pronounced {{IPA|/tʃ/}}).

Related Topics:
English language - Digraphs

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To see a list of the phonemes in the English language, see IPA for English.

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Two sounds that may be allophones (sound variants belonging to the same phoneme) in one language may belong to separate phonemes in another language or dialect. In English, for example, {{IPA|/p/}} has aspirated and non-aspirated allophones:aspirated as in {{IPA|/pɪn/}}, and non-aspirated as in {{IPA|/spɪn/}}. However, in many languages (e. g. Chinese), aspirated {{IPA|/pʰ/}} is a phoneme distinct from unaspirated {{IPA|/p/}}. As another example, there is no distinction between {{IPA|}} and {{IPA|}} in Japanese, there is only one {{IPA|/r/}} phoneme in Japanese, although the Japanese {{IPA|/r/}} has allophones that make it sound more like an {{IPA|/l/}}, {{IPA|/d/}}, or {{IPA|/r/}} to English speakers. The sounds {{IPA|/z/}} and {{IPA|/s/}} are distinct phonemes in English, but allophones in Spanish. {{IPA|/n/}} (as in run) and {{IPA|/ŋ/}} (as in rung) are phonemes in English, but allophones in Italian and Spanish.

Related Topics:
Chinese - Japanese - Spanish - Italian

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An important phoneme is the chroneme, a phonemically-relevant extension of the duration a consonant or vowel. Some languages or dialects such as Finnish or Japanese allow chronemes after both consonants and vowels. Others, like Italian or Australian English use it after only one (in the case of Italian, consonants; in the case of Australian, vowels). Often a change in quantity correlates with a change in quality, and thus it may be contentious as to whether the quality or quantity, or both, is phonemically relevant.

Related Topics:
Chroneme - Finnish - Japanese - Italian - Australian English

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