The discrete and distinctive units constituting the internalized inventory of sounds of a language. A sequence of phonemes is the preverbal form of a word. Phonemes may be systematically distorted upon verbalization, resulting in an allophone. Phonemes and allophones are both "phones".
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92 views
Why do people from a certain region sometimes have difficulty pronouncing certain sounds?
There is a word in Indian Bengali which is "sala", but in Banladesh Bengali it is pronounced as "Hala". The "s" becomes "h" in a Bangladeshi's tongue. Similarly "Tsunami" seems to be impossible to be ...
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1answer
158 views
IPA for phonemes - does this make sense at all?
On the Wikipedia page for the International Phonetic Alphabet, slashes for phonemes are mentioned quite casually, without getting into the discussion of how or if it makes sense to use a phonetic ...
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1answer
262 views
Is there a language with but one vowel sound?
Is there a language known to have no minimal pairs separating vowels, or in which only one vowel exists phonemically in the language, or whose speakers don't detect a difference between any two vowels ...
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1answer
160 views
Mandarine Phonemes: Which ones are not shared by English AND the most likely to be used?
There are 214 (by one count) Mandarin phonemes. How can I learn
Which of those are not shared by English?
Which of the remaining number are in the most common use (assuming they follow the Pareto ...
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1answer
113 views
For natural languages, are there writing systems that consist entirely of signs for phonemes on one hand and grammatical morphemes on the other?
At omniglot.com, we find scripts whose characters more-or-less stand for consonant phonemes, or all phonemes, or syllables, or words. But I've never heard of a language whose written form consists ...
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2answers
212 views
Is there an IPA character for the sympathetic sucking in sound?
Is there an IPA symbol for the sound you might make when you burn yourself or someone tells you a story about an injury they have—when you suck your breath quickly through your teeth with your ...
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0answers
101 views
Patterns of accent changes by non-native English speakers
I am looking for a list of 'accent changes', or pronunciation inaccuracies, non-native English speakers commonly make when speaking English words. The list would obviously be native language specific ...
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1answer
142 views
“oeuvre”: foreign phonemes in a loanword
I recently came across oeuvre, which in the two out of two times I've heard the word spoken (in an English context), sounded like it does in Merriam-Webster's online audio pronunciation, that is, with ...
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3answers
812 views
Definition(s) of phoneme
What different definitions of phoneme do you know?
Please note that I'm not asking for an explanation of what phoneme is but rather for professional definitions. I'm interested in how the issue is ...
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4answers
174 views
Are there languages in which two or all three of /χ/, /x/, and /ç/ are opposed as distinct phonemes?
These (and some others) are all quite similar raspy sounds to most ears and by features other than place of articulation:
[χ] unvoiced uvular fricative
[x] unvoiced velar fricative
[ç] unvoiced ...
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2answers
562 views
Where did Spanish get its /x/? Arabic influence?
Most Romance languages don't have /x/ (like the j in hijo), nor did Latin. Where did Spanish /x/ come from? Internal development, Arabic influence, or something else? Since Moroccan Arabic also has ...
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2answers
312 views
Where does the term “segment” fit in in relation to “phone” and “phoneme”?
In a recent question seeking to clarify how diphthongs relate to phonemes, another term popped up in the comments, segment.
This made me wonder if "segment" is some kind of synonym for either "phone" ...
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2answers
1k views
Is a diphthong one phoneme or two, or does it depend?
In Mitch's answer to "What is the difference between a diphthong and a glide?" and its comments it seems more than one of us is at least a bit confused as to how many phonemes a single diphthong ...
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7answers
377 views
If similar phonemes are pronounced the same, will this be difficult to understand for a native speaker?
In French, phonemes like /e/ and /ɛ/ are so similar in sound. In English, phonemes like /o/ and /ɔ/ are just so similar too.
Brief is that, in almost any language, there are phonemes which are very ...
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3answers
358 views
Which languages other than Chinese have apical vowels?
Which languages other than some Chinese languages have apical vowels? The "apical vowels" are the i in zi, ci, si (in IPA: z̩ (also seen as ɿ)) and ʐ̩ (also seen as ʅ). They are basically buzzed ...
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1answer
182 views
How do you determine the phonemes in small phonemic inventories?
Languages with small phoneme inventories such as Pirahã often encourage different constructions of the phoneme system. In the case of Pirahã, it either lacks phonemic velars or phonemic nasals. Are ...
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5answers
382 views
What is a phoneme in the context of a signed language?
A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language.
SIL.
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6answers
642 views
Is the very concept of the phoneme disputed?
I believe there was some important research published in recent decades which brought a fundamental change to the way linguists think about phonemes.
Or is it that the concept of the phoneme has ...
3
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1answer
165 views
What are typical triphones used in natural language processing?
Reading the claims of Method for natural voice recognition based on a generative transformation/phrase structure grammar
What exactly would they be looking at in a sentence to aid the processing?
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