A phoneme itself, however, is really too abstract |
A phoneme itself, however, is really too abstract |
phoneme as one of the abstract signals of the phonetic system of a language which corresponds to a set of similar speech sounds which are perceived by speakers of the language to be a single distinctive sound in that language. Compare with allophone, which is one of those similar speech sounds: an allophone is a variant of a phoneme. Allophone is the contextually specific implementation of phoneme, and phoneme is the (language dependent) smallest distinguishable unit of sound. In a particular context an habitual approximation of the phonemic ideal usually becomes so familiar as to be conventional. |
phoneme as one of the abstract signals of the phonetic system of a language which corresponds to a set of similar speech sounds which are perceived by speakers of the language to be a single distinctive sound in that language. Compare with allophone, which is one of those similar speech sounds: an allophone is a variant of a phoneme. An allophone is the contextually specific implementation of phoneme, and phoneme is the (language dependent) smallest distinguishable unit of sound. In a particular context an habitual approximation of the phonemic ideal usually becomes so familiar as to be conventional. |