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.

Non-phonemes

Prothesis, epenthesis and paragoge due to phonotactics add sounds into words without adding meaning. Nevertheless, the sound is added, and thus the phoneme status may be ambiguous. For example, Spanish prothetic e- must be added before consonant clusters, e.g. estres.

Related Topics:
Prothesis - Epenthesis - Paragoge - Phonotactics

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