Phoneme
A phoneme (/ˈfoʊniːm/) is any set of similar speech sounds that is perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another.
An example in American English is that the sound spelled with the symbol t is usually articulated with a glottal stop [ʔ] (or a similar glottalized sound) in the word cat, an alveolar flap [ɾ] in dating, an alveolar plosive [t] in stick, and an aspirated alveolar plosive [tʰ] in tie; however, American speakers perceive or "hear" all of these sounds (usually with no conscious effort) as merely being allophones of a single phoneme: the one traditionally represented in the IPA as /t/.
For computer-typing purposes, systems such as X-SAMPA exist to represent IPA symbols using only ASCII characters.
The words, therefore, contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed [kʰ] for the aspirated form and [k] for the unaspirated one.
In some languages, however, [kʰ] and [k] are perceived by native speakers as significantly different sounds, and substituting one for the other can change the meaning of a word.
To take another example, the minimal pair tip and dip illustrates that in English, [t] and [d] belong to separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/; since the words have different meanings, English-speakers must be conscious of the distinction between the two sounds.
For example, English has no minimal pair for the sounds [h] (as in hat) and [ŋ] (as in bang), and the fact that they can be shown to be in complementary distribution could be used to argue for their being allophones of the same phoneme.
It is challenging to find a minimal pair to distinguish English /ʃ/ from /ʒ/, yet it seems uncontroversial to claim that the two consonants are distinct phonemes.
In other languages, such as French, word stress cannot have this function (its position is generally predictable) and so it is not phonemic (and therefore not usually indicated in dictionaries).
The term phoneme as an abstraction was developed by the Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Mikołaj Kruszewski during 1875–1895.
Daniel Jones became the first linguist in the western world to use the term phoneme in its current sense, employing the word in his article "The phonetic structure of the Sechuana Language".
[7] The concept of the phoneme was then elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoy and others of the Prague School (during the years 1926–1935), and in those of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield.
[8][9] Later, it was used and redefined in generative linguistics, most famously by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle,[10] and remains central to many accounts of the development of modern phonology.
By analogy with the phoneme, linguists have proposed other sorts of underlying objects, giving them names with the suffix -eme, such as morpheme and grapheme.
The latter term was first used by Kenneth Pike, who also generalized the concepts of emic and etic description (from phonemic and phonetic respectively) to applications outside linguistics.
The notion of biuniqueness was controversial among some pre-generative linguists and was prominently challenged by Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
An example of the problems arising from the biuniqueness requirement is provided by the phenomenon of flapping in North American English.
[16] Some phonologists prefer not to specify a unique phoneme in such cases, since to do so would mean providing redundant or even arbitrary information – instead they use the technique of underspecification.
In order to assign such an instance of [ə] to one of the phonemes /a/ and /o/, it is necessary to consider morphological factors (such as which of the vowels occurs in other forms of the words, or which inflectional pattern is followed).
Instead they may analyze these phonemes as belonging to a single archiphoneme, written something like //N//, and state the underlying representations of limp, lint, link to be //lɪNp//, //lɪNt//, //lɪNk//.
[17] However, other theorists would prefer not to make such a determination, and simply assign the flap in both cases to a single archiphoneme, written (for example) //D//.
The English language uses a rather large set of 13 to 21 vowel phonemes, including diphthongs, although its 22 to 26 consonants are close to average.
Yuen Ren Chao (1934), in his article "The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems"[26] stated "given the sounds of a language, there are usually more than one possible way of reducing them to a set of phonemes, and these different systems or solutions are not simply correct or incorrect, but may be regarded only as being good or bad for various purposes".
[29] Zellig Harris claimed that it is possible to discover the phonemes of a language purely by examining the distribution of phonetic segments.
However, because changes in the spoken language are often not accompanied by changes in the established orthography (as well as other reasons, including dialect differences, the effects of morphophonology on orthography, and the use of foreign spellings for some loanwords), the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in a given language may be highly distorted; this is the case with English, for example.
He identified the bundles tab (elements of location, from Latin tabula), dez (the handshape, from designator), and sig (the motion, from signation).
More sophisticated models of sign language phonology have since been proposed by Brentari,[34] Sandler,[35] and Van der Kooij.
[36] Cherology and chereme (from Ancient Greek: χείρ "hand") are synonyms of phonology and phoneme previously used in the study of sign languages.
A chereme, as the basic unit of signed communication, is functionally and psychologically equivalent to the phonemes of oral languages, and has been replaced by that term in the academic literature.
Instead, the terms phonology and phoneme (or distinctive feature) are used to stress the linguistic similarities between signed and spoken languages.
