Phoneme

The basic building block of any discussion of articulatory phonetics is phoneme. The technical term “phoneme” is usually used to refer to sound segments. Linguists define phoneme as the minimal unit of sound (or sometimes syntax). The phonemes of a particular language are those minimal distinct units of sound that can distinguish meaning in that language. In English, the /p/ sound is a phoneme because it is the smallest unit of sound that can make a difference of meaning if, for example, it replaces the initial sound of such words as bill, till, or dill, making the word pill. The vowel sound /ɪ/ of pill is also a phoneme because its distinctness in sound makes pill, which means one thing, sound different from pal, which means another. Two different sounds, reflecting distinct articulatory activities, may represent two phonemes in one language but only a single phoneme in another. Thus phonetic /r/ and /l/ are distinct phonemes in English, whereas these sounds represent a single phoneme in Japanese, just as [p^h] and [p] in pie and spy, respectively, represent a single phoneme in English although these sounds are phonetically distinct.

Phonemes are not letters; they refer to the sound of a spoken utterance. For example, flocks and phlox have exactly the same five phonemes. Similarly, bill and Bill are identical phonemically, regardless of the difference in meaning. Each language has its own inventory of phonetic differences that it treats as phonemic (that is, as necessary to distinguish meaning). For practical purposes, the total number of phonemes for a language is the least number of different symbols adequate to make an unambiguous graphic representation of its speech that any native speaker could read if given a sound value for each symbol, and that any foreigner could pronounce correctly if given additional rules covering non-distinctive phonetic variations that the native speaker makes automatically. For convenience, each phoneme of any language may be given a symbol.

When we talk about the sounds of a language the term “sound” can be interpreted in two different ways. Eg. /t/ and /d/ are two different sounds and we can illustrate this by showing how they contrast with each other to make a difference of meaning in a large number of pairs, such as tie-die, seat-seed. But if we listen carefully to the /t/ in let us and compare it with the /t/ in let them we can hear that the two sounds are also not the same. In both examples the articulation of the sounds is different. To avoid this ambiguity the linguist uses the term phoneme – the image of the sound.

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