5 ms·
This is an excellent article! However, I find the definition of phonemes very unsatisfying: > Phonemes are not exactly the same thing as sounds, and they’re no
by bradrn 5y ago
This is an excellent article! However, I find the definition of phonemes very unsatisfying:
> Phonemes are not exactly the same thing as sounds, and they’re not exactly the same thing as letters. They are kind of like connecting categories that map letters to sounds … Phonemes are a way of saying, If you see a letter “r” is this situation, use Sound A for it. If you see “r” in this other situation, use a different Sound B for it. But Sound A and B are not fixed — they will vary depending on the specific dialect.
The problem is that this relies on letters, which is a problem because (a) many languages are unwritten, and (b) many other languages have weird irregular orthographies (e.g. English, French, Irish and Tibetan). Instead, in linguistics, the standard definition is that two sounds are different phonemes if they can be the only thing differentiating two words. For instance, in English, /p/ and /b/ are different phonemes, because we have pairs of words like pat and bat, which differ only in that one has /p/ and the other has /b/. By contrast, Mandarin has no such word pairs… but it does have the distinction between /p/ and /pʰ/ (where the latter has an extra puff of air, or ‘aspiration’), in words like /pa²/ ‘fall’ and /pʰa²/ ‘crawl’. But [p] and [pʰ] are not distinguished in English — we have a single phoneme /p/ which can be pronounced in either way, with no difference whatsoever.
(Of course, this definition can sometimes get difficult to apply. For instance, English has no minimal pairs between /h/ and /ŋ/ [the sound ending words like ‘sing’], because the one only occurs at the beginning of a syllable, and the other occurs only at the end. But by and large it works satisfactorily.)
- tombh 5y agoYou got me thinking about minimal pairs of /p/ and /pʰ/ in English (at least my British English anyway). I'm not a linguist, but is this not a minimal pair? Mice pour (water into a jug) My spore (as opposed to your spore) Or can minimal pairs not cross word boundaries?
- bradrn 5y agoInteresting question! Not a linguist, but I’d be inclined to the view that the word boundary itself is phonemic: these can be transcribed (for me) as /ma͡is poː/ vs /ma͡i spoː/. Supporting this analysis is the fact that the [p] vs [pʰ] distinction then can be derived using the same phonological rules as usual; also, for me, the /a͡i/ in /ma͡is/ is slightly shorter than that in /ma͡i/. But, as I said, exactly pinning down the phonemes of a language can be tricky.
- tombh 5y agoThanks for the cool IPA! I think that seems totally reasonable that the word boundary itself is phonetic, as such it could be intentionally accentuated (as a longer than usual pause) to clarify. Oh wait but isn't [pʰ] word-initial only anyway? So in a way it has an implicit word boundary. BTW does your accent not aspirate "pour"? So you don't do /ma͡is pʰoː/?
- bradrn 5y ago> I think that seems totally reasonable that the word boundary itself is phonetic, as such it could be intentionally accentuated That’s not what I mean. By ‘the word boundary is phonemic’ [not ‘phonetic’!], I mean that the word boundary can be transcribed on the phonemic level, and is thus allowed to influence the phonetic realisation of other phonemes. > BTW does your accent not aspirate "pour"? So you don't do /ma͡is pʰoː/? No, it does: [mɑ͡ispʰoː].
- kortex 5y ago(Not saying you are wrong, I'm trying to clear up my misconceptions) I didn't realize that phonemes were perceptually distinct units of sound, in the same way graphemes are visually distinct units. (yes there is the whole "some speakers recognize different sounds in their brain as the same" wrinkle). What would the term be for units of sound which are perceptually distinct regardless of listener's perspective? E.g. [p] and [pʰ] are non-phonemic in English but are in Korean, and you can tell them apart with a spectrogram. Or is that just not a distinction linguists make?
- bradrn 5y ago> phonemes were perceptually distinct units of sound, in the same way graphemes are visually distinct units Yes, exactly! This is a great way to describe it. (I think I might steal it for the future, even.) > What would the term be for units of sound which are perceptually distinct regardless of listener's perspective? The closest is ‘phone’, as mentioned by umanwizard, but I’m not sure there is any one word for this, because the concept itself is poorly-defined, and you can make two sounds arbitrarily close. Can you tell apart [a æ]? What about [a̝ æ̞]? How close can they get before you can’t distinguish them by ear? Before a speaker of another language can’t distinguish them by ear? Before you can’t distinguish them even with a spectrogram? And the language you speak really is important — I’m fine distinguishing [p pʰ], I think, but I know people who can’t even hear a difference. Linguists talk as if there were specific sounds, but really there’s only ‘fuzzy’ sets of sounds which people perceive as being more or less similar.
- School-Cotton 5y agoPhones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]