Questions tagged [phonemes]
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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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 ...
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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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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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What is the phonetic and phonemic destinction between a semivowel and a vowel?
I have read several articles that claim that phonemically, /j/ and /i/ are the same and distinguished from each other by being syllabic or not. What confuses me is that I can hear the difference ...
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Influence of the climate and geography on the phonemes
I would like to construct a language for a fictional world. From what I gathered in different places, the first element to consider are the phoneme used by the speakers.
However, since I already have ...
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How do allophones become distinct phonemes?
The title pretty much sums up my question, but to elaborate, how do allophones of phonemes become their own distinct phonemes?
For example: in Old English, /θ/ became /ð/ between vowels, but in ...
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Does assimilation of voice produce different phonemes, or just allophones?
During assimilation of voice, voiced consonants become voiceless and vice versa: s - z, d - t, etc.
cats ([ts])
dogs ([ɡz])
missed ([st])
whizzed ([zd])
Are these sound pairs different phonemes, or ...
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Database of words that differ by one phoneme
I want to test whether people are able to distinguish different phonemes from each other.
Example:
men (/mɛn/) and man (/mæn/)
The user of the software is supposed to hear the correct pronunciation ...
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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 /x/...
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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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How does the nonsense word "frabjous" conform to English phonotactics?
I am aware that this question is rather more complex than I am treating it, but I am looking for a few general rules (e.g. basic phonotactic constraints) that would lead to the conclusion that the ...
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Does sample text exist that includes most English sounds represented by the International Phonetic Alphabet?
My understanding of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is that it aims to provide a set of letter-based values that represent and map to fundamental sounds present in human languages.
My ...
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Was the change in spelling from "cw" to "qu" in English associated with any difference in pronunciation?
I always thought that "cw" in Old English represented /kw/, and the same for modern English "qu", and that the change from one to the other was purely orthographic, since the "qu" digraph was more ...
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Does any language using the Latin alphabet have a unique name for "w"?
In English, we call w "double-u", referring to the original representation of [w], which looked like uu, or two us. Then, in French, they pronounce it "double-veh", presumably because the modern form ...
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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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Can a phoneme function as an allophone?
Let's say some hypothetical language had the phones [g],[k],[ʔ],[h]
and we determined /g/ to be the UR of the following allophones:
/g/: [g],[k],[ʔ]
But upon further examination, you may be able to ...
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How does a field linguist record rare, unknown features of an undocumented language? Is it likely for him/her to miss the details?
A field linguists is most likely an adult, after all. We all know that babies are capable of hearing the specific sounds in natural languages. As a person grows up, however, he/she starts to lose the ...
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How to read Spectrograms using Praat Script
I am new to Praat and trying to read the spectrograms of different sound files using these videos. I am learning to read the specrograms using the UI of Praat but I am unable to find any way through ...
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Voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate in english?
The "officially" voiceless alveolar-palatine affricate does not exist in English. But I can clearly hear it in the sentence "Ouch that hurt" (when the computer reads this sentence ...
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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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Is there any standard way to sort phonemes?
Is there a defined way to order phonemes, phones, or other qualities of speech, such as those represented in the IPA?
Suppose I'm listing the following sounds (and their descriptions, say, or links ...
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List of phoneme per language
I there a resource that lists the phonemes that are used in different languages? I would prefer a ranking of the most common phonemes within each language like in this example:
German:
1 /ɛ/
2 /ə/
....
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In which Slavic languages are [h] and [x] contrastive? [closed]
Starting from this question, I have a "prequel" question. In which Slavic languages are [h] and [x] contrastive?
As far as I know, there is no [h] in Russian, but only [x], but there is ...
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From where I can get phonemes in audio format?
I am working on a speech recognition system and to begin with I need all phonemes of English in audio format by which I will be able to compare with my speech fragments.
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Australian Aboriginal Languages: Fricatives
Can anyone give me any information at all on the distribution of fricatives (or the lack thereof) in Australian aboriginal languages, nearby languages, and worldwide? Additionally, any further or ...
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Is a Phonemic representation ONLY at the underlying level?
Is it accurate to claim that the underlying level is (only) characterizable by a phonemic representaiton of a word and the surface level is (only) characterizable by a phonetic representation of a ...
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Looking for contrastive feature hierarchies for Irish, Manx and/or Scottish Gaelic
Where might I find ready-made contrastive feature hierarchy trees for these languages? In the case that they aren’t available anywhere online, I may need to make my own, in which case I’m looking for ...
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Why are phonemic transcriptions necessary, when phonetic transcriptions are more detailed (and more helpful for language learners)?
Ian Roberts, Prof. of Linguistics, Univ. of Cambridge. The Wonders of Language (2017 1 ed).
p. 27 Middle
Be sure to get your terminology right: phonetics is the study of the speech sounds ...
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